


Rocks Give Way To Rain

by ekho (mariatheripper)



Category: Guardians of Childhood - William Joyce, Rise of the Guardians (2012)
Genre: Angst, Claustrophobia, Emetophobia, Emotional Hurt, Guilt, Hot Chocolate, Hurt/Comfort, Kissing, M/M, Mental Instability, Movie and Book Spoilers, Slow Burn, Smut, Some Badass OCs to Shake Things Up, Tattooed Pitch, mentions of a past abusive relationship
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-10-01
Updated: 2018-02-06
Packaged: 2018-08-18 21:06:04
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 25
Words: 272,177
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8176081
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mariatheripper/pseuds/ekho
Summary: Jack has endured a great deal during his three centuries beneath the Moon's gaze, and in the icy fires of his darkest years, he'd forged bonds that had hurt him as much as they’d healed him.
Bonds that he had tried to forget about during his decade spent alongside the Guardians after the defeat of Pitch.
But chains forged in fire and fear are not easily broken, and when Jack’s newfound harmony is shattered the day North's Code Black signal crawls across the skies once again, fate will see him allying with a bunch of inglorious scoundrels and a king whose intentions are more questionable than his morals.
And Jack’s totally chill with that, since he’s not all that nice himself.





	1. Prologue: Knock Knock

**Author's Note:**

> Hi!
> 
> I'm hoping this doesn't turn out to be a train wreck, and if there's anything I think might be super dodgy in a chapter, I'll post a warning in the notes beforehand :3
> 
> Also I feel like I should be putting a disclaimer here, so just btw, I don't own any of the Rise of the Guardians characters nor any of the Guardians of Childhood characters (all that goes to William Joyce and Dreamworks). Yes? Yes.

Not many knew of the Holomire people, the hidden fae native to the forest of an ancient quadrant of the faerie realm. They were a strong tribe of people, infamous throughout the lands for their tenacity when dealing with the giants that roam the plains outside their forest, their traditional values, and their acute anti-social behaviour.

Myth tells of how the very first Holomire king, disgusted with the changing, expanding fae realm (which was just beginning to consolidate in Court form), took his crown and wove an ancient magic into it.

This magic brought a veil upon the Holomire’s forest and the lands surrounding it, drawing the tribe’s people (and, unfortunately, the giants lingering nearby) into a realm of their own. The plains, rolling hills of lush green, which used to connect to the ever-blooming valley of what was to become the Imperial Court became endless and borderless. To step out from the forest in one direction would only result in the explorer returning, weary, on the other side of the forest even if his course never deviated from that straight line. The trees of the forest grew, evermore, into a sky that swirled a glacial white and bore no resemblance to the skies of the rest of the fae lands.

This new realm became the Holomire’s sanctuary. Only permission from the king, the wearer of the crown, permitted any outsider access to the forest – and this permission was not given lightly.

After the consolidation of the fae Court, an official invite was extended to the Holomire for the sake of peace. Every two hundred years ambassadors visited the Holomire, to renew a formal contract of allegiance to the faerie empire. Few others besides these emissaries were ever allowed past the realm’s borders.

 

Thousands and thousands of years after the creation of the Holomire realm, another pair of representatives from the Imperial Court arrived at the outskirts of these hidden people’s lands. One, a fae who had been recruited into the Imperial Army barely two centuries earlier, uttered the formal request for entry in the ancient tongue of the Holomire. Magic entwined with sound, and paired with the soldier’s flawless pronunciation of what was one of the oldest and most difficult to articulate languages in the fae world, the appeal for admission sounded like a softly sung war cry. Strange enough to send a shiver of fear down any nearby spine.

But this trip would not be like all the others, and the pair was quick to realise that something was not right. The realm had not opened for them, as it had for countless fae before them. As it always did for Imperial ambassadors.

“Why aren’t they answering us?” the soldier’s fellow ambassador asked.

“Something is wrong,” was the grave answer.

And the two were left, standing on the edge of a valley, watching as no gateway opened and no response was offered. In front of their eyes, the petrified remains of the Holomire’s forest – the lifeless shells of trees that were left behind when the new realm was created – stood in their snow. The soldier’s request rattled between their skeletal bodies until it finally echoed out into an ominous silence.


	2. One Little Scarie

The last time North had sent his borealis across the skies, Pitch Black had been attempting to drown the world in darkness and fear. The Guardians of Childhood had assembled, and amidst varying degrees of grumbling and hurled insults, accompanied every now and then by  _actual_  progress, they'd brought peace to the children of the world once again. They had also welcomed a new member into their ranks, a young man who had been abandoned by the Moon for three hundred years, only to regain its attention again seemingly out of nowhere.

Ten years on, and sometimes he still found himself asking why.

And the lack of reply bothered him just as much as it did three hundred years ago.

As the borealis danced for the second time in a decade across the world, neon and hypnotic fingers curling through sky, the Guardians who risked life and limb for children all over the world were called to the North Pole.

But this time something different was going down in the Workshop. North’s reaction told the Guardians as much, even before half of them had had a chance to even notice the lights.

The Code Black signal had barely made it to the southern hemisphere before the Russian lost patience waiting and sent elves out to collect the Guardians. The elves themselves had barely been gone long enough for North’s spiked cocoa to cool before he had sent the yetis after them to see what was taking everyone so long.

And so when everyone warped into the Workshop, elves clinging to their designated Guardian, and yetis carrying them all through the portals, the Guardians were lit with panic. Not even the threat of the Nightmare King had made North this anxious. Their collective anxiety was definitely not improved by the fact that the first glimpse they caught of their fearless North was as the man was pulling out pieces of his glorious beard and yelling in a guttural tongue at an elf trying to offer him a cookie.

Shaking off the three elves that still clung to his arm, Bunnymund stomped over to North and grabbed the Russian by his broad shoulders. “North, what the bloody hell is going on? I swear, if you’ve got us here to paint some flaming toys, so help me, North, I will  _throttle_  you.”

Toothiana soared up off the patch of floor a moustached yeti had dropped her on and in her usual frantic pace, counted up three of the four baby teeth she’d managed to bring along with her. It took her a nanosecond to notice that the fourth was being held tight by an elf, its tiny brain still bent on doing its job of collecting the Guardians. With narrowed eyes, she clenched a fist and bopped the stupid elf on the head. The baby tooth fluttered, gratefully, over to Tooth and nestled into her neck feathers with its twittering sisters.

The Sandman booted an elf off his miniature dream cloud as Jack Frost wrestled Phil – it  _had_  to be Phil, no other yeti looked at him with such unadulterated  _loathing_  – off him with a sharp elbow into the yeti’s hairy gut. When Phil advanced on him a little, Jack held his staff out between them and raised his eyebrow, daring the yeti to try him without turning into a popsicle.

That’s when Jack heard it.

The usual din and commotion of the Workshop was louder, more fierce. Jack could distinctly make out yelling, and lots of it, along with splintering wood and shattering glass. He lowered his staff and looked over the balcony and up, out toward the levels and levels of factory that spiralled up to the roof.

His eyes grew hopelessly wide as he saw that the Workshop was trashed, the toys ruined. Yetis were fighting – not in the controlled, civilized way they usually bickered over disagreements about colour palates. This was  _savage_  fighting, with nails and teeth and bits of broken furniture. He could see sprays of blood and bite marks from where he stood, and elves foaming at the mouth as they descended onto each other like rabid animals.

It was horrifying.

A sick twisting began in the pit of Jack’s stomach.

“North,” Tooth asked, a small hand reaching up to cover her mouth, “what’s happening?”

A flaming wad of broken toys sailed down like a meteorite from one of the higher levels. The mass of burning wood crashed into the foyer a level below the Guardians, spraying sparks everywhere. Jack was quick to extinguish the flames.

The hands Bunny had once used to berate North with now looked like they were trying to support him. “I do not know,” the Russian said, weariness dripping from his deep voice. “They will not stop. They will not listen. Sandy, please –”

But Sandy was already on it. With a concerned frown on his face, the Guardian of dreams summoned a swirling storm cloud of gold sand in the middle of the open room. Once it was large enough to catch the attention of some of the yetis brawling near the banisters, the sand swarm exploded and smacked each and every fighting elf and yeti with a face-full of dream sand.

Everything living dropped like sacks of bricks as little figures of gold sand appeared over their sleeping bodies.

But the Workshop was not brought to silence. The absence of noise in the main workroom only made the growling from the basement louder, the thrashing and the animalistic snarls that were barely even recognizable as the sounds North’s reindeer made. They had always had a feral side to them, and Jack had learnt the hard way that they were not playful in any sense of the term. But they had never made sounds like this before. A shiver of fear stole up the back of Jack’s neck.

Without a moment’s delay, Sandy floated off down toward the bowels of the Workshop to put the reindeer into a dream state powerful enough to soothe their savage attitudes. Jack rubbed the back of his neck as he turned back to where the yetis and elves who had been unaffected by this mess had formed a circle around North. Someone had fetched him a chair to sit on. They looked like they were trying to comfort him, but North still didn’t want the cookies offered to him. Jack didn’t blame him.

“North,  _talk_  to us,” Bunny said, his usually gruff tone a little uneven. He ran a paw over his ears as he gazed out at the sleeping bodies scattered around the workroom. “What happened here?”

“ _Why_ ,” Tooth whispered, cradling her baby teeth against her chest. They were trembling.

With a heavy sigh, North raked his hands over his face and mumbled, “I do not know what happened,” into the palms of his hands. He went on to explain that everyone had been normal and working so  _efficiently_  toward their Christmas goal – which he didn’t even mention was in a mere four months, he was so rattled – before the entire Workshop fell into a sudden silence. Yetis stopped working, elves stopped moving. Then, just as suddenly as they had grown quiet, they all turned on each other in violence. The only workers spared were the few in North’s office with him during the day. He had tried to talk to them, tried to disarm them, but they were deaf to all but their own intentions. And so, bereft over the safety of his workers, North had called for help.

Most of North’s words were so garbled the Guardians had to creep forward periodically to catch his next sentence. By the time he was finished, the yeti barricade had been shoved aside and everyone was standing a foot apart from each other. North brought his hands from his face and jolted in surprise at everyone’s proximity.

Somewhere in the workshop, the snarls of the reindeer fell quiet.

“Has this ever happened before?” Tooth asked softly, looking around her when the eeriness of the quiet began to settle in.

Jack felt that silence crawl down his throat and lodge somewhere near his chest. North’s workshop was never this quiet. Too many working bodies meant that there was always a constant, reliable, comforting racket echoing throughout the complex. As much as it annoyed Jack, the noise of the factory always relaxed him as well – reminded him that there were so many living bodies just beyond the wood of North’s office door.

The silence made him feel ill in a way he hadn’t experienced in a  _very_  long time. It became ensnarled in the contorting nerves just below his gut, forming a dark mass of dread that sat uncomfortably heavy. 

North shook his head miserably.

“Could it have been something in the food?” Jack tried, earning a glare from the elf still trying to thrust the cinnamon treats at North.

“How about the water? Is it fluoridated? Has everyone been brushing properly?” Tooth suggested.

Bunny squinted around the room and added, “Paint fumes? Are your ventilation systems running alright? I have a mate who could –”

“None of those reasons makes sense of  _this_ ,” North interrupted with a stronger voice, making a grand gesture toward the workroom. He was quiet for a moment, before quivering. “Workshop should not be this quiet,” he murmured.

North’s sadness hit Jack hard, and his fingers twitched around his staff. The Guardian of wonder shouldn’t be  _this_  upset – he shouldn’t be hiding his face in his hands as if he couldn’t bear the sight of his own home. Jack knew that North was no push over – the man had been fighting in defence of children and the moon for longer than Jack could imagine – and in the face of danger he had never once looked like this. So…lost.

The dread grew thicker.

Needing to move, to wear out this horrible feeling, Jack flew out of the ring of yeti as Bunny began to console North and made his way up to one of the less crowded floors. With the finesse of a frost spirit known for his light steps, Jack tiptoed through the mess of sleeping bodies, some of which were snoring atrociously. He grimaced at the sight of some open wounds slashed across the torsos and faces of the yetis, accompanied by tiny bleeding bite marks from the elves.

“Some of the yetis are hurt pretty badly,” Jack called over the banister. He heard North groan, before uttering something that spurned the yetis surrounding him into action. They dashed off, presumably to get some medical supplies, and North brought his face from his hands and met Jack’s gaze.

“What do your eyes see, Jack?”

_“Open your eyes, Frost. You can’t hide from this.”_

A whisper of a voice slithered through Jack’s mind, a voice he recognised but uttering words he didn’t. He frowned, trying to recall where the memory might be from, but pain lanced through his temples and the voice floated out of his reach. He glanced around at the sleeping bodies, rubbing his skull to rid himself of the pain and the taunting trail of light the memory left in its wake, and realised he didn’t know how to answer North’s question.

What was he meant to say?  _North, it’s carnage up here. You’re gonna have to start your toy production for Christmas from scratch, and if these guys don’t wake up with their screws in tight, you’re gonna have to hire new staff while you’re at it._

No. Definitely not.

By his foot, a dream sand toy robot gave a handful of flowers to the dancing candy cane in the dream of another yeti close by, the sand creatures blissfully unaware of the state their hosts were in. Jack’s gaze flickered for a moment down to Bunny, who nodded imperceptibly at him. Someone had an unhealthy dose of faith in his articulation skills, it seemed. Jack licked his lips and tried for a reassuring smirk. “A mess we’ll get to the bottom of, North. Promise.”

North’s shoulders sagged. Tooth gave Jack a small, grateful smile, and he knew he’d said the right thing. He exhaled a breath.

Now all they had to do was keep the promise.

Snoring off to Jack’s left cut off abruptly, and he left the banister to go check out the small mountain of elves who had fallen asleep on top of a yeti. A deep breath from the base of the structure toppled half of the elves to the floor, but they kept sleeping on through the fall. The yeti, though, was beginning to twitch in his sleep.

Jack was about to call again for those medical supplies when suddenly the eyes of the yeti snapped open. Wide, round orbs that usually rested in a hue of green that was bright and full of North’s wonder were wild, unseeing, darting all over so fast Jack couldn’t track the movements. Before Jack got the chance to aim his staff in the name of defence, the yeti reared up with a terrible roar and grabbed at Jack. He leapt back just in time to save himself from a grip he knew from past experiences was more tenacious than a dog’s bite. Jack’s heart vacated his chest and went for a holiday somewhere around his tonsils, and when the yeti finally locked its sights on Jack, finally looked at Jack like he saw him, the organ stopped working all together.

Those eyes held a fever, an irrational thirst for anything, for everything. Shoving the rest of the elves off its body, the yeti began to drag its huge body toward Jack, closing in on the frost spirit foot by foot.

The twisting, choking dread became a black oozing mass of sickness. It rooted Jack to the spot, his eyes unable to leave the hulking, fevered beast clawing itself toward him. He couldn’t feel his hands, couldn’t move his staff. He was frozen.

 _No, no, no_ , his mind screamed, panicking.  _Move, move, move!_

But his body wouldn’t respond. The yeti reached for Jack’s leg, its hand so big a good clench and it could crush the entire limb.

It had barely touched Jack’s pant leg when a ball of dream sand came sailing over Jack’s shoulder and bonked the yeti right in the forehead. The massive worker collapsed instantly, and Jack gulped in a relieved breath of air, swallowing around his heart which was still clogging his throat.

“Thanks, Sandy,” he breathed as the Guardian of dreams floated along beside him. Sandy gave him a thumbs-up and a question mark, asking if he was okay.

Jack tried for that comforting smirk again. His limbs cracked back into life now that he wasn’t in the crazed sights of that yeti, and a fraction of that oozing black quivered back to wherever it had come from. But only the tiniest scrap; the rest Jack could feel swirling like some living thing inside of him, dredging from the soles of his feet and the tips of his ears every particle of unease he had the capacity of holding and gathering it into one black place.

Before he could properly respond to Sandy – or even excuse himself to go be sick somewhere in private because this feeling in his gut was seriously  _not_  friendly – movement off by one of North’s many book cases caught Jack’s attention. He squinted and saw some sort of  _thing_  walking along one of the shelves, legs out wide like kids do when they’re trying to balance on a narrow line, pretending to walk a highwire. It had a small white body that looked to be covered by a sheet, a round head of the same shade, and a thin black neck – Jack guessed it would be the length of his forearm, at least – separating the two body pieces. Small black legs pin-wheeled when it was about to topple off the high shelf – and it had to pick one of the highest, didn’t it? – and a tuft of dark hair that looked suspiciously like dead grass sat atop that round head, swaying each time the creature violently dipped.

It kind of reminded Jack of the tiny monsters that swarmed in the Halloween King’s fields, always biting at each other and making a hell of a noise until the sun rose and they vanished into their pumpkin homes.

But what the hell was something like that doing in North’s workshop?

Jack frowned when he noticed that it had something flung around its neck, and when he glanced at Sandy to see if he saw it too, the Sandman displayed an alarmed flurry of symbols that ended on two sabres that looked remarkably like –

“Oh shit,” Jack breathed. Keeping one eye on the weird little creature, Jack angled his head and called down to the others, “Hey, North. Tell me you have your swords on you.”

“Swords?” the Russian replied. “They are in office. Why? Am I to be needing them, Jack?”

Jack swallowed as the creature leapt off the shelf and landed, surprisingly steady, on its twiggy legs. North’s swords, the loop for the holsters thrown around the creature’s neck, were nearly twice the size of the little thing. But it didn’t seem to notice the weight at all as it twirled and began skipping off out of sight.

“Yeah, about that,” Jack called, starting off after the thing. “You guys might want to get up here. There’s a creepy looking spirit and it’s got your swords, North.”

There was a moment when the Guardians below were silent, presumably registering Jack’s words as he and Sandy flew off after the creature. Then, a terrible sound was ripped from North’s throat, echoing throughout the Workshop and catching the attention of the creature. It seemed to suddenly become aware of its surroundings – or maybe for the first time actually  _cared_  – and began to sprint, faster than something with legs so thin carrying swords that easily weighed as much as Jack himself should be able to. He shot ice after the thing, trying to block its path with a wall of the stuff, but the creature leapt and twirled so deftly and so quickly that it was always too fast for Jack’s magic to catch up.

 _Damn it_ , he thought, soaring through an abandoned part of the Workshop as the creature nimbly used a sheet of Jack’s ice to dash up onto another floor.  _Where is it even going?_

As far as Jack could tell, the creature was moving deeper and deeper into the heart of the Workshop. It had gotten into the place somehow, and unless it had broken its way in through the roof of the fortress – which was not feasible in the least, Jack could vouch for that – it was definitely heading away from all the exits Jack could think of. When the creature pulled a stop, slide and dash move that was frighteningly fast – so fast Jack just about lost his trail on the thing – a snake of golden sand shot after the creature, travelling faster than Jack and Sandy could and at least giving them something to follow. Sandy expelled more, probably seeking to block off its path somehow, before falling behind Jack and taking another route.

_So agile, even with those damn swords on its back._

Up ahead, Jack saw Bunny appear at the head of one of the dozens of staircases that wove throughout the Workshop as alternate routes of transport to the rickety lifts that North always loved to travel in. The narrow hallway they were currently in meant the creature could either turn back and take it chances with Jack, or continue onwards toward the oversized rabbit with the boomerang.

It chose to plough on.

Literally.

Jack didn’t quite know what the hell Bunny was expecting of something travelling as fast as this little freak – but obviously it was  _not_  the momentum the creature hit Bunny with, front on, no energy reserved. Too slow to actually be of any  _help_  in catching the thing, Bunny’s lack of lightning reflexes was rewarded by the Pooka being knocked flat on his back – luckily a foot away from the stairs, otherwise his day would have gone south very quickly – and subsequently trampled by tiny feet.

Jack laughed, and although it earned him a pointed glare from Bunny – but really, what didn’t? – he honestly couldn’t stop the laugher from bubbling up his throat. Between the churning sludge in his gut, his rattled nerves from seeing North’s Workshop being torn apart by its own workers, and the frankly hilarious display of Bunny being flattened by something so small, the laugher was as much hysterical as it was from a root of humour. Eventually the sound caught in his throat and he choked, causing a spasm to grab hold of the mess in his gut and squeeze violently. Grimacing, he rubbed his stomach as he stepped over Bunny’s prone body.

He was so busy trying to mentally feel out what the hell was happening in his torso that he nearly missed Bunny talking to him. The Pooka had to grab hold of his ankle to get his attention, and nearly tripped Jack in the process.

“ _What_?” he snapped down at Bunny, his mouth working before his brain could switch on his politeness filter.

“Don’t ‘what’ me, mate,” Bunny growled back, bristling at Jack’s tone. Jack winced; he kind of deserved that. “What’s wrong with you, Jack? You look right crook, kid, and you’re fighting like it too.”

Instantly, Jack’s guilt passed like a summer storm. He felt like mentioning that Bunny looked like a complete idiot still lying there on the floor, but bit his tongue after a moment’s consideration. He was getting angry because of this atmosphere, this stress coiling inside him. He just needed to remember that shutting his mouth now saved tediously rebuilding friendship bridges later on.

As a golden wisp of sand tickled the side of Jack’s arm sleeve, he tried for a tone that conveyed anything other than the impatience that was beginning to itch at his skin. He needed to move, to get back on track to getting North’s swords. Bunny was wasting his time.

 _Breathe_.

“What are you getting at, Bunny?”

The Pooka sat up and set a patronizing look onto Jack – one that nearly made the frost spirit leave then and there. “Why don’t you just use your frost to freeze that – whatever the bugger is, and we can all go home! Some of us have actual  _jobs_  to get to, kid.”

Jack scowled. “We’re trying to stop it, not kill it.”

“Then freeze its legs off!”

The scowl narrowed out into a look that would have been labelled as petulant by anyone who didn’t actually  _know_  Jack. Bunny was definitely one of those people, and it hurt Jack a little when he realised, not for the first time, that their relationship hadn’t really improved in the ten years they’d been sworn under the same code. And it wasn’t like Jack couldn’t handle the rough banter – he’d been around his fair share of scumbags throughout his three centuries – but his and Bunny’s exchanges never really sat well with Jack. After all, he could only tease so much before the lack of friendliness in a conversation started to pinch a little too hard at his feelings.

He wasn’t made of ice. Not completely, anyway.

Without a word in reply, he brought forth a wind and flew off over Bunny’s body and after the sword thief. Bunny might have thought that a simple ice cube around the knees would solve all mobility issues, but Jack knew better.  _Obviously_  he knew better. With the speed the creature was travelling at, freezing its legs solid would have resulted in the thin limbs snapping, and  _god_ , just the thought of it made Jack dizzy. The cold he could control wasn’t meant to be used for that kind of thing. For  _hurting_  things.

 _So screw you, Bunny_ , Jack seethed as he hooked his staff around a bannister and swung himself up onto a higher floor of the Workshop. Jack located the nearest golden strand of sand and noticed it was pulsing a white light, directing the Guardians up toward rooms North had once mentioned were used for storage. Jack sped up, trying, naively, to leave his agitation at Bunny’s idiocy and his own sickness in his wake.

Up in what Jack supposed could be considered the attic of the Workshop – the very top floor, a spacious round landing with dozens of wooden doors on the walls – the sand dispersed. Without the golden glow of the sand, or any sort of balcony or windows to let in external light, the floor was dark in a disorienting way, and Jack resorted to floating over the floorboards after he nearly brained himself on a stray toy. By the faint glowing light his staff emitted, and the weak lights the others were working by, he could barely make out Tooth, North and a small glowing Sandy rustling through room after room. It didn’t take Bunny long to join the Guardians on the top floor – after all, he could move like lightning when he wasn’t being an asshole – and as he brushed past Jack wordlessly, the frost spirit decided not to mention the stray landmines that littered the ground. His efforts were rewarded almost instantly with Bunny screeching a curse and nearly falling on his face.

_If this is where the sand leads…_

That must mean they were as close as they could be to the creature. It had to be around here somewhere, a fact that became clear to Jack when he looked over his shoulder and noticed that the only doorway to the lower levels was being blocked by two yetis jammed together.

They looked so uncomfortable like that, but at least it left minimal room for the creature to squeeze through. Jack took note that all the Guardians were searching on the right side of the room, and figured a start on the left couldn’t hurt. He headed over to the oversized sheets of solid wood that hung on the room’s walls, and just as he was about to crack open the door closest to him, he paused.

_No. That one over there._

His hand lifted off the handle.

Two doors to his right, Jack’s fingers brushed wood that was almost too cool to the touch, and the door groaned on its ancient hinges, already open. He pushed the door open wider, and was met with a room almost as dark as the feeling that was still festering inside him. He charged his staff with a little more frost magic, causing it to glow a little brighter, and stepped into the nerve-shattering darkness.

The room was deeper than Jack thought it could be, and also a hell of a lot emptier. Not a single toy or piece of junk lined the walls – in fact, the only thing that North seemed to keep in the room was a box in the middle of the far wall.

And, of course, the faint glow of his staff revealed to Jack that the little creature was sitting atop it.

Setting his feet on the dusty ground, Jack gently began to move toward the creature, curiosity guiding his steps. The creature’s legs were swinging a mile a minute over the side of the box, its lack of arms to ground its torso resulting in the thing swaying a little violently. Jack half expected it to fall on its face.

 _Come on you little shit_ , Jack thought, biting his lip.  _Give up those swords already._

When he was a few feet away from the creature, he opened his mouth and called to the others. The sound caused the creature to suddenly stop its fidgeting and turn its head up to look at what was approaching it so carefully. Up close, Jack could see that its mouth was nothing more than a dark split, resting beneath two eyes that were longer than they were wide, and impossibly deep. He was reminded of a pair of portals leading into complete darkness.

 _No_ , he realised, belatedly. The darkness wasn’t complete. Twin flames, burning a colour colder than ice, ignited in the depths of that black. Jack felt himself gravitate toward the light, toward the vortexes of depth that seemed to swirl around the –

Light, all absorbing, and all burning, filled his vision.

_“Jack! Help us, Jack.”_

_“Fucking hell, Frost. Pull yourself together.”_

_“Please help us.”_

“Jack.”

A hand on his shoulder shot a hot, bright stripe of panic down his arm, and Jack jerked back. It took him a solid moment to clear his vision, to clear the voices from his head that were rotating and twisting and knotting in his mind. Voices he could barely recognize. Voices that made the oozing, sickening  _black_  in his gut begin to spread and fill his veins. His skin crawled.

Blearily, in some still-functioning corner of his mind, Jack noted that while he’d been having his moment the Guardians had assembled around him. Words were exchanged over his head as coils of glowing sand shot straight for the creature. Its speed couldn’t save it this time, and after dodging a few whip cracks, Sandy got a good grip of the creature’s legs. It still struggled, but held upside-down there was little escape at its disposal.

Fingers tightening on his staff, Jack glanced down at the floor, at the few elves all twined together with fairy lights, at the handful of glowing eggs Bunny had pulled out of, presumably, his ass. With a sigh, he let the magic fizzle out of his staff now that there were decent lights bumping into each other at ground level, and glanced up at the two Guardians he was standing between. Jack managed to work out that Tooth was asking North why this room was so empty compared to the others, and North, looking about as comfortable as a penguin in a sauna, was doing a very bad job of trying to evade her questions.

The Russian leapt, a little too happily, at the opportunity to relieve himself of Tooth’s scrutiny when Sandy offered him the creature. With the deftness of a man who created the most delicate of ice sculptures in his spare time, North wrapped one arm around the creature whilst extracting his swords from the creature’s neck.

As soon as the swords were safely in the hands of their rightful owner, the creature began to thrash with earnest intent in Sandy’s grip. Without the giant chunks of metal to weight it down, it curled up on its thin legs and Sandy had to drop the thing, before it seriously hurt itself. Bunny, the closest Guardian to the creature when it landed on its tiny feet, had all of no time at all to react, in which he somehow – it must have been a miracle, honestly – managed to get a decent hold on the flailing creature.

As North began cooing at his newly reclaimed treasures, Jack glanced warily at the spirit in Bunny’s hold, afraid of another flash of whatever the hell that light was. But the spirit was too busy to bother about Jack as it tried desperately to land a decent kick or head-butt on Bunny so it could run away.

An almost sickening bodily tension tightened in Jack’s stomach – a feeling he was familiar with, which was more than he could say about the oozing sludge sitting like liquidized disgust a fraction lower in his abdomen – and he felt like telling Bunny to just let the thing go. They’d already got the swords back, what else did they need it for?

But before he could, the spirit abruptly gave up its fight.

_What the hell is it doing?_

Bunny rattled the creature a little, probably unsettled by its new tactic of playing dead. Which was, frankly, working splendidly. Unmoving and limp, it was impossible to tell if the thing was alive or not. Especially with those dark eyes, unkindled this time, just staring at Jack like unblinking orbs of bottomless –

Jack snapped his gaze up to Bunny before he could make the same mistake twice.

“Hey,” he croaked, nodding toward the apprehended sword thief. “What even is that?”

“No idea,” Bunny said, looking a little distastefully down at the grinning creature. “Never really seen anything like it before. Oi, North, can we get goin’ already? Hanging onto this guy is making my skin crawl.”

“ _Firstly_ , we must ask thief questions,” North declared. At the Russian’s side, Jack noticed with a touch of sympathy that Sandy had fallen dead asleep on his feet.

Feeling a little claustrophobic in the tight circle of Guardians, Jack backed away from the scene North was about to make. He couldn’t blame the man for wanting to interrogate a spirit who’d managed to walk right on into the Workshop without tripping a single yeti alarm (or being mauled by one, as the day’s events made highly likely). But Jack doubted North would get anything useful out of the spirit – the smile painted on its face looked about as flexible as an ice sculpture.

And as it so happened, Jack could have a promising career in the oracle business if the Guardian gig went up in flames. North tried, first in the patronising way he often spoke to his elves, and then in the gruff tone he used on most of the yetis, to extract some form of sound from the creature. But the effort was fruitless, and soon Jack found himself on the other side of the room out of boredom. He stared down at the box the creature was once seated on, and realised that it wasn’t just an ordinary box – it was a chest, rusted and riddled with bolts and a combination lock written in symbols that reminded Jack vaguely of the letters adorning North’s gold ring.

The closer he stepped to it, the thicker the darkness in his stomach became, until he was nearly doubled over by the weight of it. But he couldn’t stop moving. Under his skin, his veins began to become uncomfortably present, he could feel them taught and alive under flesh that was too tight, too –

Pain, so sharp and grating that Jack was momentarily blinded by the need to  _scream_ , pierced right into the back of his neck. It curled, like a taloned hook, up and into the base of his skull, where a colour so dark and polluted poured into his senses, fusing with and spreading the black in his gut throughout his body. His staff dropped, clattering onto the floor. His knees followed, hitting the floorboards with such force that his teeth snapped together. Fingers, his own, clawed at the back of his head to try and remove the source of the pain. His nails tore into his own flesh, but met no form of alien weapon.

Somewhere, in the depths of his subconscious, he felt the shouts of the Guardians slam into his existence, bombarding him with the kind of sweet, desperate concern that was just so…

_…fucking useless…_

…heart wrenching when he couldn’t do anything to ease their agitation. He breathed through the pain, but was unable to stop the breaths from turning into heaving sobs. He cried out, wringing his voice hoarse, his throat raw and bleeding and  _shredding_  –

And then the pain surged up from the base of his skull to the back of his eyes, and throbbed out of existence, taking the heaviness in his gut with it.

A humming sting was all that was left, leaving a trail of mildly discomforting but bearable pain travelling from his temples down his spine. Jack heaved on a relieved sob, out of his mind with a sense of fear that curled every tendon in his body.

_What the fuck just happened?_

He cracked his eyes open and saw that his forehead was pressed, painfully he now noticed, into the edge of the chest. On an exhale that shook as much as he did, Jack pulled himself out of the foetal position he had fallen in and flinched when North’s voice boomed into his brain.

“We leave now, Jack. Come.”

His hand found the metal of the chest and his fingers curled on the rust, a fingertip tracing over a letter engraved on the edge of the metalwork. Despite the fact that it wasn’t freezing up in the attic space, despite the fact that nearly everything Jack touched felt warm because of his body temperature, the chest was cool. Just like the door leading in here. Almost as if inside it was containing something even colder than Jack.

_Colder than you, that’s a laugh._

“Jack,” North repeated, insistent. The hardness in his voice betrayed a quiver, a tremor, and Jack could hear a shard of anxiety trying to hack its way into his words.

Bunny, for some reason, jumped to his defence. “North, give him a minute. We don’t know what’s wrong with him.”

His surprise at Bunny’s attempt at chivalry drew his attention away from the rust he had started chipping off the chest, and he looked just over his left shoulder and up at the Pooka.

Who was standing there empty handed.

Jack frowned and quickly got to his feet, wincing a little when the tingling in his spine protested the movement. “Where did it go?”

Tooth, fluttering by his shoulder, tutted a little. “Jack, do you need to sit down for a bit?”

He barely heard her words once he noticed that blood was dripping down Bunny’s chin.  _Damn, it must have gotten in a head-butt after all_. “I’m fine, honest. But where did the spirit go?”

North set a look on Jack that was embroiled with concern – but not the soft, oh Jack are you okay here have a cookie sort of concern. No, this was a concern that was laced with a steel edge, the kind of emotion that was pressure cooked and condensed into a form that could very well kill a person in order to save them.

Jack shrunk back a little. North’s eyes flickered down toward the chest, then back at Jack, who couldn’t decipher the look he saw in them. “Little creature squirmed out of Bunny’s grasp and escaped. Tiny fairies followed and told Tooth it ran outside into snow and out of sight. Workshop is now safe.”

Jack’s throat went dry. How long had he been on the floor for all that to go down without him? He glanced between the Guardians and all he saw were expressions of utmost concern. Even Sandy was awake and displaying above his head small pictures of beds and tea and first aid.

He swallowed, hard. North’s expression softened a little when he saw how spooked Jack was, and waved Jack on toward the doorway. “Let us go. Fresh air helps clear mind.”

“I think we all need a little of that, to be honest,” Bunny murmured as he followed a small clump of glowing eggs out the door.

Tooth, in agreement, shot one last look over her shoulder at Jack before she flew out after Bunny with her fae following after her. Sandy waited by the door, his glowing presence saving Jack and North from blindness.

Jack rubbed the back of his neck, the muscles still twinging. A part of him didn’t want to follow after the others, didn’t want to descend those stairs only to face a workroom filled with sleeping, hurt workers. He wanted to stay here, in this darkness, beside one of the few things aside from the snow he created that was colder than him.

But one look at North told him that he couldn’t. The man was holding out his hand to Jack, and there was that anxiety prickling his deep blue eyes again.

_What is he afraid of?_

A slice of North’s apprehension slid into Jack’s stomach.

He turned to grab his staff while he could still see it. But as Jack bent for his favourite magical twig, one hand on the chest for balance, a prickling sensation crept across the back of his neck. He snapped around, a hand on the back of his neck to scratch the feeling away, and saw that nothing was standing behind him. North and Sandy were waiting by the doorway, the former frowning at Jack’s suddenly movement.

Without his permission, his heart began to thump, too fast, too painfully, in his ribcage. He could feel his pulse pound through his lungs, his stomach, his throat, closing all passageways with its vibrations. His eyes widened when he realised he couldn’t breathe, couldn’t gasp for the slightest hint of air, and a burning filled his lungs, too hot, too soon, too familiar.

With a petrified whine, he doubled over, somehow still on his feet. He couldn’t hear anything besides his escalating heartbeat, the fire building in his lungs, a scream that continued on and on and brought tears to Jack’s eyes.

Then something  _touched_  the fingers still gripping his neck.

Eyes he hadn’t realised had been squeezed shut snapped open. Sandy’s light was gone, the world left in a haze of black and blurring shapes, none of them any real colour. The focus of every wafting figure was draining into whatever was curling long, thin fingers over his own, stroking soothingly along his knuckles and down to his wrists. The limbs were almost sharp as they glided over his skin, causing pain but not applying enough pressure to break skin.

Or were they just so sharp that Jack was bleeding,  _bleeding_ , and didn’t even  _realise_?

Panic hit him hard, and he tried to pull his hand back to his face, to check it, tried to claw at whatever was behind him with the other. But the fingers gripped his wrist fast. His free hand came up empty.

He stilled when a voice spoke to him, a voice he didn’t recognize. A voice so thin and brittle, so hoarse and broken, so  _haunting_  that the sound wrapped around every thread in Jack’s body, spreading roots into each and every bone and scratching the moisture out of his veins, whispered the words, “Come find me, Jack,” against the base of his skull.

The fingers uncurled.

As did Jack’s consciousness.

He pitched forward, right between two distorted legs, and blacked out.


	3. From Weird To Worse

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Jack gets sent on an errand and runs into someone he really doesn't want to.

The next time Jack opened his eyes, he was more than relieved to find the world right again. Full of colour, of the ancient wood that forever held the Workshop structurally sound, of the bright reds and crisp whites that were splattered on toys and sketches around North’s office. Full of tangible shapes, some moving, some stationary, but thankfully none draining into another stronger presence.

 _A presence that exuded maximum creepiness,_  he blearily thought to himself as he sat up. His head protested violently against the new angle of existence, but he gritted his teeth through the throbbing pain. He needed his staff. Where was –

A breath escaped his lungs when his fingers closed around familiar wood, and he brought the staff to his chest, thankful beyond measure that someone had left it resting within arm’s reach of his unconscious form.

Swinging his legs over the side of the sofa he had been left on, Jack secured his staff safely between his legs and ran his fingers thoroughly over the back of his neck and his skull. He was going to have to ask North or the other Guardians if they knew what the hell had happened to him in that room, because those fingers? That pain? That fucking  _voice_? That had not been normal. None of that had been okay.

His eyebrows drew together when he couldn’t find even one port of access for that awful pain he had experienced – no cuts, no tender flesh, nothing. Aside from a throbbing pressure that made moving his head too quickly uncomfortable, no sensation was left behind, not even the tingling that had coasted down his spine.

 _They do say sleep heals all_ , his mind muttered.

“I wish painkillers worked on spirits,” he mumbled, ignoring his thoughts.

As if prompted by the sound of Jack’s grumbling voice, the door to North’s office flew open with a dramatically violent boom, revealing the even more violent and dramatic owner of the Workshop. With a surprised yelp, Jack snatched his hands away from his head and nearly dropped his staff in the process.

As he tried to gather his magical stick as well as his wits, North smiled and stomped over to Jack’s sofa.  “Jack!” he exclaimed, picking the spirit up by the shoulders and planting him on his feet. Jack’s skull only mildly berated its owner for the sudden and unexpected movement, and Jack sent a silent, thankful prayer to nobody in particular. Hopefully the throbbing would fully fade away soon. “You are awake! How are you feeling?” With less jolliness, and a great deal more concern, his sights narrowed in on Jack’s brain. “How is head?”

Jack felt like shrinking to the size of an elf under North’s scrutiny. And he would have, given half the chance, if it weren’t for the few elves that had wandered in with North – one, unfortunately, which was staring him down with the same level of friendliness Phil often held for him.  _Cookie bearer_ , Jack mentally noted, adding another mortal nemesis to his list of people to irritate.

Dragging his gaze away from the glaring elf, Jack met North’s deep blue eyes and tried to hold that caring stare. Pathetically enough, he lasted about five seconds before his chest tightened and he had to look out and around the office. “I feel…confused? But okay. Better. The pain’s all about gone now, thankfully.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Jack caught the relief that washed over North’s features, and the man sat down heavily on the sofa. Jack cracked his back and watched, gently, as North rubbed his hand over his beard thoughtfully. It was the second time that day that Jack had seen the man so lost in his own head, but at least this time it wasn’t in hopelessness. “Did everyone wake up?” he asked, a little cautious in case the news was bad.

North looked at Jack blankly for a moment – a moment long enough for Jack to partially start sweating – before realisation suddenly stole upon him and he smiled so radiantly Jack flinched as if a whip has been cracked. “Oh! Yes! Everyone is happy and healthy again. We turned entire floor into big medical wing, and Tooth sent many of her faeries to help mend wounded. We are thinking that maybe it was little spirit’s doing, since everyone is in right mind without it here. But we are still unsure. But! Plus side, the Workshop is functioning again, loud and noisy, just how I like it.”

Jack’s heart had started stuttering half way through North’s speech, and was having some serious cardinal problems by the end. “Is everyone back at work now?” he asked, his voice small.

North frowned at the change in Jack’s tone. “Yes, and rushing to make Christmas deadline. Are you okay, Jack? Is it your head?”

The mentioned body part shook, meekly, and Jack had to swallow before he asked, “North, how long was I asleep for?”

North’s hand grew still in its ministrations, and two dark eyebrows returned to their rightful positions. North’s unreadable eyes travelled over Jack before he patted the space next to him on the sofa. “Sit, Jack. I will tell. Just…sit.”

And wasn’t that just ominous as hell. Despite his skin starting to itch with tension, Jack did what he was told, finding a comfortable spot on the arm of the sofa, his body turned in toward North. The man’s hand found its way back into his beard and he combed through the long, white strands as Jack waited. His patience wore thinner with every passing second, until eventually he spoke up, trying to prompt North into coughing up the bad news already.

“Week,” was his reply.

Jack blanched. “I was sleeping for a whole –”

“Two.”

“TWO WHOLE WEEKS?” he shrieked, jumping to his feet. His outburst startled the other elves in the room, and one dropped a (small) pitcher of water. The glass shattered on the floor. “And no one thought to try and wake me up?”

North looked up and in his eyes there was something darker than his usual wonder, than the concern, than the misery of the commotion that had brought them all together.

 _Two weeks ago_ , Jack had to remind himself, raking his nails down his face.

The darkness in North’s gaze looked like a shadow of something he wanted to ask, wanted to say, but knew he couldn’t. It made Jack uncomfortable. He knew the weight of that look, the look of secrets, of a concern entrenched so deep in something so horrible that it just had to be  _told_ , but the words weren’t allowed to pass through lips. The tongue couldn’t curl around them. And so they festered,  _gnawed_. Jack felt like begging North to  _just stop_  looking at him with those eyes. With the expression that made Jack feel like all these years he had been hanging out with the Guardians, had been making a mess in North’s home, everything had meant nothing to the bond of trust that was meant to have been forged between them.

This last decade had meant nothing.

“Sit,” North instructed sternly, jabbing a finger back at the space of sofa Jack had abandoned.

But this time the frost spirit shook his head. “Please don’t look at me like that,” he whispered, and slapped a hand over his mouth as soon as the words dissipated into the air.

“Jack –,” North tried.

But Jack couldn’t look at him. Not while he had those eyes. Those eyes did not promise Jack warmth and acceptance and the opportunity to not look outside the window and see the world for more than the vast, lonely place it was. Those eyes looked at Jack like he was a stranger, and it hurt beyond any pain Jack could ever experience – which was saying something considering what had put him to sleep in the first place – that the look was in the eyes of _North_ of all people.

He curled his hand away from his face, forming it into a fist, and took a shaking breath. “Do you know why I slept for so long?”

There was a moment of silence whilst North exhaled a sigh that made Jack want to look at the man, made him want to curl up next to him on the sofa like he kept  _telling_  Jack to and just bask in his body warmth. But his head wouldn’t turn, his feet wouldn’t move. The places on his shoulders where North had gripped him before had already gone cold again.

“This we do not know,” he admitted in a low voice. “Someone came in here at least twice a day to try and talk to you, but we figured you were healing, Jack, and we didn’t want to disturb.”

 _I doubt it takes fourteen days for a headache to clear up_ , Jack thought to himself.

He cleared his throat. “Well, thanks for looking after me, North. And sorry for flaking out while we were trying to help you.”

North’s sigh this time was heavier, sharper. It drew Jack’s attention before his fear could stop him, and he found, mercifully, that the darkness had passed out of North’s gaze. A sadness had replaced it, though, one that made Jack’s chest clench in guilt. “You do not need to be thanking me for such things, Jack. It is what I am here to do. And do not be sorry, either.” North pointed a finger at Jack’s head. “But do tell me this, Jack. Did anything happen to you in that room? We watched you in so much pain –” North’s face contorted at the memory “– but what caused it? Was it little spirit? Was it…the chest I kept in there?”

The last part of North’s question seemed to hold a little more emphasis than it should have, but Jack was too busy to notice. The verbal reminder of his ordeal had prompted a reliving of the feeling of slicing fingers gliding along his, a voice husking at the base of his skull to go searching, the presence, that terrible presence, absorbing everything around it.

He felt dizzy just remembering it, and had to shake himself out of the memory to answer North’s question. “No, it just came out of nowhere. The spirit gave me a funny look but that was about it.” The ghost of those fingers curled over his, and he had to unclench his fist to rid the feeling of the sharp limbs. “I don’t know what caused it.”

North just nodded. “We must think. But not now, later. Tooth told me to send you to her when you woke up. She has been worried.”

Jack smirked a little at this. North was probably making this shit up to keep Jack’s flight response from kicking in. It was kind of sweet that the old man didn’t want him out on his own – and replaced some of Jack’s anxiety over seeing that look in his eyes with a healthy dose of warmth – but he could have at least picked Sandy, the only other Guardian besides North who was reasonably easy to find.

Which meant, in Jack terms, that Sandy didn’t require portal navigation to locate – Jack just asked the winds to carry him toward the largest golden cloud there was. Although Punjam Hy Loo was accessible without a portal (technically, anyway) Jack still got hopelessly lost whenever he tried to find it, and since the winds were not much better, he figured Tooth had some sort of magic surrounding her palace to ward off spirits who might stumble upon the place. And, of course, Bunny’s place was in the dirt somewhere, and his warren holes were so expansive Jack would probably decompose and become one with the soil before he actually found Bunny’s headquarters.

It was a pretty decent security system, in its own way, he grudgingly supposed.

“What, so Bunny and Sandy gave up hope, did they?” Which would be pretty damn ironic considering Bunny was the _Guardian_ of hope.

North chuckled at this, and Jack felt some of the tension which had started to bunch his shoulders loosen. “They, too, will be happy to know you are awake and making jokes at them. But Tooth was explicit. She may have mentioned a sister?”

Jack groaned quietly. Yes, that made more sense. Not that Jack wouldn’t believe in Tooth’s genuine concern for him. But she was so busy that outright demanding him to warp into the Tooth Palace just so she could check on his health would seriously hinder her work efforts. And considering none of the other Guardians were willing to clock in some paid leave to throw Jack a Happy Waking Up party, Tooth’s overt concern seemed a little odd.

 _They’re all workaholics, anyway_. They probably wouldn’t wait at the bedsides of each other if one of the “Big Four” (as Pitch had so dubbed them) fell into a coma.

But Tooth’s little sister, on the other hand? Well, Vanish was an entirely different kettle of fish.

One that Jack wasn’t quite sure he was up to facing just yet.

He made a face at North, hoping, maybe, that North may have  _met_  Vanish once upon a time and thus could conjure an inkling of sympathy for Jack. “Do I have to go?”

But hope was useless. North looked outraged that there was even a possibility that Jack wouldn’t accept Tooth’s call. He began pulling something out of his pocket as he boomed, “Absolutely! And say hello to Tooth for me when you arrive.”

“Wait, you mean –”

Before Jack could even finish his question, North had procured one of his damn snow globes and was rattling the thing. Jack began backing away from the crazy old man, looking for the window as a means of escape. He hadn’t realised that North had meant he needed to visit the Tooth Palace  _right this second_. He’d figured maybe in a few hours, a day or so if he could push it –

A portal swirled to life beneath Jack’s feet and he tumbled out of the Workshop, cursing North and everything the man stood for as he fell into a vast blue sky.

 

Punjam Hy Loo was seriously, if Jack had to put what little artistic training he’d ever acquired into words, breathtaking. Tooth had crafted a masterpiece out of rose gold and the mountains the palace resided in, creating a structure that looked like a natural jewel exposed on the ridge of the earth. He laughed at a thought that left him with a mental image of Mother Nature dancing around with Tooth’s palace as a glistening ring on her finger, all gold and colour and she would absolutely  _adore it_.

 _She probably does adore this place_ , Jack thought as he noticed some fae approaching his flying form.  _A precious piece of stone and metalwork made especially for her world_.

“And also to keep a heap of teeth in,” he added aloud as he was suddenly swarmed by tittering Baby Teeth. He laughed as they all began fighting over who got to sit on Jack’s shoulder as he soared toward the palace.

Jack’s welcoming party directed him toward the visitor’s entrance of the palace, where he was offered water (that he politely refused) and was bullied into taking a seat on an ornate arm chair by a small fountain. The armchair had probably been moved down for his sake, considering how out of place it looked in an empty, open room, so he let himself think the Baby Teeth had won this round and propped his staff against the chair. They made happy little noises before fluttering off, no doubt in search of their boss.

He honestly didn’t want to piss off the Baby Teeth, they were so kind to him after all, but after two weeks of lying motionless on a sofa Jack wasn’t prepared to commit just yet to another form of chair. His limbs ached a little, and although the flight here – as impromptu and involuntary as it had been – had done a great job of limbering him up, he still felt twitchy.

 _A snow day is in definitely order_ , he thought, feeling an excited little tingle just at the idea.  _Maybe even ten. And a blizzard_. It was only autumn in the Northern Hemisphere (and a wet spring in the Southern, last time he checked) but he could definitely slip in a snowstorm somewhere near Russia and make it  _not_  seem like climate change had completely fried the weather. Right?

_….Right?_

“Or I can always just blame it on climate change if Boreas tries to kill me,” he said quietly to himself.

“Who is the Winter King killing?”

Jack jumped at the sound of Tooth’s voice, swearing on his pounding heart that it was purely recognition alone that saved his fight switch from flicking on with an icy snap. Tooth suddenly fluttered into his field of vision, her feathers shining their usual lovely shades of green and blue and gold, and embraced Jack in a tight, warm hug.

For a moment, he didn’t know how to respond. Although the Guardians were “touchy” in the sense of brief, hands-passing-over-shoulders, even briefer hugs, and group huddles that lasted barely long enough to make them worth their embarrassment, those touches weren’t enough to get Jack used to physical contact completely. After all, the wayward weirdoes he had met during his three hundred years as a nomad had been even  _less_  of the touchy-feely types than these guys, and the vast stretches of time spent between interactions had been starved of contact of any kind at all.

_Result? Award-winning levels of social retardation._

Before he could even tell his brain to put his hands around Tooth – like a normal functioning human being – she was off him and talking, quickly and efficiently, to a group of her Baby Teeth. Once their orders were given, she turned back to Jack and put her hands on his shoulders. He could sense the restraint she had to employ not to go straight for his mouth. And it was  _monumental_.

Laughing a little at just how weird she could be, Jack opened his mouth for her and Tooth giggled a little before taking a quick look to make sure his teeth were all in check.

“You really do have lovely teeth, Jack,” she said with a soft smile. Then her smile disappeared and she gave Jack a serious look. “But that’s not why I brought you here. Are you feeling better? You were in so much pain, Jack, you sounded so terrible! We were all worried.”

He gave her the most reassuring smile he could considering the shit that went down actually scared him a little more than he cared to admit. “I’m all better, really. North gave me the rundown of everything that happened while I was out, and he also says hello. Oh! And I heard that you train your Baby teeth as medics as well as dentists. You’re an overachiever, Tooth.”

Tooth looked a little too pleased with herself as she dusted her knuckles on her feathers. “I taught them everything they know,” she said proudly. “I’m glad you’re feeling good as new, though, and please return North’s greetings for me.” But then her cheerfulness faltered, and she cast her eyes up toward the higher towers in her palace. She seemed to consider something, then asked tentatively, “Are you sure you’re fully healed?”

Jack followed her gaze up and noticed that there was a greater than usual concentration of Baby Teeth hovering around one of the higher towers. Usually everyone was buzzing around sporadically, so witnessing an actual swarm was off-putting. “What’s happening up there, Tooth?”

Tooth laughed a little nervously as she began to fly up toward where the Baby Teeth had gathered. Jack summoned a wind and followed her, albeit less gracefully, until he began to notice what all the commotion was about.

 _Why_? he mentally groaned.  _Why can’t my life go back to being about snow days and pissing off forest fae?_

As Tooth was shooing away her Baby Teeth from the tower, she turned back and grimaced when she saw whatever look was on Jack’s face. Jack cursed, silently, and went ahead manually composing himself. He shot Tooth an apologetic look as he flew up beside her and landed on the golden platform of the tower. He was so used to not being seen by the majority of the people he hung around that schooling his emotions was something he sometimes had to actively think about.

But, honestly, Jack figured that anyone presented with what was currently in front of him would have a little trouble keeping a straight face.

Writing – black foreign lettering that ranged from ginormous slashes to tiny incoherent scrawl – was strewn across the once beautifully constructed tower. The graffiti looked like the ramblings of a mad man, and covered nearly every available surface, including the rose-coloured wall where the tower’s teeth were kept.

Jack stepped toward wall and ran his hand over the scale-like tiling, now ruined by the messy black scrawl. If he tilted his head a little to the left, he thought he could make out some of the characters – but he could’ve easily been wrong. The symbols had hard edges and deep, swirling bends splattered with too many dots. It looked nothing like any human script Jack knew of, and nothing like the writing on North’s ring or that chest.

Strangely, though, Jack still felt as if he’d seen this style of lettering somewhere before – and he stared at it all until the characters started to move threateningly.

A hand touched his shoulder and he flinched, involuntarily. Tooth was quick to lift her hand, and instead rubbed her fingers together as she glanced over the mess of writing too. “It all just appeared a few days ago, and it keeps growing. More words appear each night and all the writing spirals down the tower.” She sighed to herself and touched the wall by Jack’s hand, her tiny palm resting above a piece of clean tile while his traversed rough black smudges. “As silly as this may sound, before we try scrubbing it away I kind of want to know what it says.”

“I can’t read it, if that’s what you were hoping for.”

Tooth shook her head, retracting her hand. “I’d be surprised if you could, even I can’t decipher it and I am much older than you, Jack Frost,” she said, poking him playfully in the shoulder.

Jack scoffed as he rubbed the offended spot. “Then what do you need me for?”

She looked a little guilty. “There’s this lexicon, written by a human but disturbingly accurate in translating old fae languages. It should help, if this writing originates from where I think it does.”

And suddenly the guilt made sense. “And you want me to get you this book?”

She whirled on him like lightning. “I’m sorry to ask this of you when you’ve just woken up from such a  _long_  sleep – and it’s not like I want you to run errands for me –”

Jack rolled his eyes. “Tooth, chill. It’s cool, I get that you’re super busy. Just give me the name and where to find it and I’ll try and get it back to you before this creepy stuff ruins your decor.”

It wasn’t like he had anything else better to do with his time, anyway. As menial as a task like this was, and as ego-bruising as it potentially could be if he let it, Jack could placate his inner need to do something good and great with the slice of pleasure he got from helping people. From doing  _something_ , rather than just flying around all day, giving humans ephemeral snaps of cold and fun which they instantly forgot about a few days later.

Tooth’s smile was warm and heartfelt. He felt better already. “Thank you, Jack.”

She ushered them out toward another tower, urging Jack along behind her so she could find something to write on. “You would not  _believe_  how many consonants his name has, Jack. I’m not insulting your intelligence, but remembering them all is an ordeal, so I’ll write them down for you. Plus, then you won’t have to try and pronounce it when you get to the shop.” With a gasp Tooth unexpectedly whirled on him, and in his surprise Jack nearly flew straight into her. His quick reflexes saved them both from tumbling to their doom – not that Tooth even noticed. She had already resumed talking. “The shop! I nearly forgot to mention it.” Her stare intensified. “Jack, the only place that sells this lexicon is the Kitsune’s Emporium, and I’m sorry to say but it’s not easy to find. You are going to have to look for a fox carved on a door.”

Jack waited to see if she would elaborate on that. But when Tooth just stared at him, as if a simple artistic reference could  _possibly_  be enough information, he peered at her. “Is that it?”

“It’s a very pretty fox,” she assured him, as if Jack was seriously worried about the quality of art on the damn door. She must have sensed from his expression that he wasn’t talking about the fox, because she suddenly threw her hands up to her cheeks. “Sorry! Wrong details. You’ll find the door standing somewhere by itself – so don’t go looking on any buildings or houses.”

A little more helpful. Still, Jack couldn’t help raising an eyebrow at Tooth’s description. “Just a randomly placed door?”

“It’s magical, of course, so if you find it in a field somewhere you won’t be swinging it open only to see more grass. But it also moves all over the world. So wherever it’s sitting today, it won’t be there tomorrow.”

Although Jack began to get the feeling that this doorway was going to be a pain to find, his growing pessimism wasn’t strong enough to extinguish the tingle of excitement that crept into his stomach. He had been alive long enough to witness the inner workings of an incredible variety of magic (whether it had been taught to him, or he had involuntarily been on the receiving end of it), but always found himself a little giddy when he discovered that there was  _more_.

_And whoever was cool enough to think of a magical doorway like that for their shop deserves a high-five._

Its lack of a fixed position, though, was a questionable concept. “I can’t imagine how moving around would be good for business,” Jack said, more as a comment to himself than anyone else, but Tooth responded anyway.

“People who need what they sell usually make a point to seek it out. Like us!” She added the last part with a small smile, which he returned.

The smile didn’t last long, though. As they began moving again, a chilling sense of realisation soared through him, and Jack abruptly remembered why he had been so reluctant about coming to Punjam Hy Loo in the first place.

“So, uh, North mentioned that Vanish was around?”

Tooth’s rose-pink eyes lit up at the mention of her sister, and she nodded fiercely. “She’s staying for a little while, and I thought I’d mention it to North to give you some incentive to visit me faster! You guys got along like a house on fire last time she came over.”

Jack coughed – spluttered, really, with no grace at all – and Tooth, arguably nearly as socially inept as Jack was on his good days, thwacked him on the back with a powerful thump. He nearly fell out of the sky, and wouldn’t that have been a right hoot considering  _there was no fucking floor_. “Thanks Tooth,” he wheezed, eyeballing her. She completely ignored him as she passed out more instructions to a different flock of Baby Teeth. He took his chance to straighten back out again and clear his airways.

Once her workers had dispersed, she looked back at Jack. “Oh! Vanish! She had to go out into the field today to help out, but if you wait around for a bit I bet she’ll be really happy to see you.”

 _Seems like someone’s gods are looking out for me after all_. Trying for the most apologetic and charming expression he had in his repertoire, he said, “Maybe next time, I really just want to rest for a bit in some snow.”

Maybe Jack should have felt guilty that his false claim of weakness had worked like a charm, but as soon as the words were out of his mouth, Tooth was in overdrive, working at speeds Jack didn’t have a chance of halting. She rattled off a list of medicinal herbs he could find to help his head if the pain returned, and to soothe his muscles because he seemed to be flying a little stiffly. Before he could even thank her for her advice, she had a piece of tile engraved with an ostentatiously long name pressed into his free hand, and was rattling one of North’s snow globes (probably left at Punjam Hy Loo for times just like these).

It was at this point that he realised that no, not guilt, but  _karma_  was seeking its revenge for his lie. He began to protest the snow globe – he could fly, after all, and where they were (wherever they were) in Asia couldn’t have been too far away from the colder climates of Russia where he could relax and recuperate –

And suddenly he was falling,  _falling_ , and Tooth was calling lovely and heartfelt goodbyes to him as he tumbled into the arctic ice outside North’s workshop, spraying snow everywhere.

“Goddamnit,” he swore, not bothering to pull himself out of the snow because this was all  _too much_  and if he tried to move  _someone_  was probably just going to throw him through another fucking globe portal and he was  _done_  –

A dark shadow loomed over him, blocking Jack from the gusts of icy wind that ripped around the Workshop, and he opened his eye a crack.

The instant he realised that it was not North – and was, in fact, one of the patrolling yeti who looked as if he was weighing up dragging Jack inside or just hauling him off the side of the cliff once and for all – Jack leapt to his feet and aimed his staff at the yeti.

“I am not going back in there,” he told the yeti resolutely. Righting his hoodie, he dusted a clump of snow out of his hair and spun in a circle until he found the shard of tile that had dropped with him. The yeti growled at Jack, probably calling him something rude, and Jack faced off with the emerald-eyed guard. “He’s going to throw me down another portal and I  _hate_  those things. So no, no inside. I am leaving. Tell North I am healthy and alive and Tooth says hi back.”

Summoning a glacial wind, Jack was whisked off into the frosty skies of the North Pole as he tried to shake off the jittery feeling those damn portals always gave him. They were blatant space-time violations, after all, and warping through them felt oddly enough like the very edges of Jack’s existence were being contorted. North and his reindeer may have been used to that sort of feeling – they had been flying through them for long enough – but the handful of times Jack had used the snow globes still left him feeling as if he needed to reaffirm his solid state by burying himself in some snow. Sailing the winds was a decidedly more natural mode of transportation, and one he massively preferred to stick with.

And so he did, travelling until the wind lost its unforgiving edge and trees appeared across the landscape, all the while blissfully unaware of the little stalk of white hurrying behind him in the snow.

 

Using winter’s winds as a mode of transport also had its downsides, and as a result it was an entire week before Jack finally stumbled across the doorway to the Kitsune’s Emporium. Since the Emporium itself was technically in another realm, the winds had no idea what to do when Jack requested they fly him off toward it. And to make matters worse, when he asked the winds to just show him the doorway, he got about as far as he usually did when he tried to find Tooth’s palace, which gave Jack the impression that the doorway was constantly on the move as a form of protection. So he had to manually find the fucking place, sacrificing the snow days he so craved to soar through countless landscapes until, mercifully, he finally collapsed outside a huge, ornate door standing in the middle of the most disgusting swamp he had ever had the displeasure of falling into.

But the odyssey Jack underwent to find the Emporium was not the most pressing issue he was faced with. Oh no, because that would have implied that Jack could have done his frantic searching in  _peace_.

 _God forbid_ , Jack mentally muttered as he looked, balefully, over his shoulder.

As if on cue, the spirit that had given the Guardians so much grief a few weeks ago emerged from the sickly looking tree line, its twiggy legs working furiously to keep up with the cracking pace Jack had set when he’d first noticed almost five days ago that he was being followed. It bounded over to where Jack was fishing himself out of the swamp mud and began skipping in circles around him, its steps so light they barely made a dent in the slick sludge.

Pointedly ignoring his unwelcomed guest – he still didn’t know why the thing was following  _him_  of all people – Jack summoned a brief waft of snow to wash out the mud-splattered bottoms of his pants and his feet. The spirit danced in the falling snow, jumping up every now and then to snap at a spiralling snowflake as Jack cleaned himself.

He had to snort at the display. “At least you’re easy to entertain.”

The spirit didn’t respond to Jack, nor did it make any indication that it had heard his words. Jack cooled his damp clothes and found himself wondering whether he preferred to have no company at all, or company that was as conversational as a rock.

An answer began bubbling, forming in his ribcage, and when Jack realised the gist of it he decided that he didn’t want to know after all. It was just too pathetic. He quickly dissipated the snow and stepped up to the doorway so he could finally get that book to Tooth like he had promised her a week ago.

_Punjam Hy Loo is probably in ruins by now._

The thought gave him an uncomfortable pause as he remembered how close it had come once before to complete devastation.

 _All of this…this isn’t Pitch, coming back for revenge, is it?_ He thought back to the day North had called all the Guardians to the Workshop to help his workers, and frowned. Could Pitch have caused all of that commotion? Was that sort of shit even in his repertoire? He instilled fear, that was sure, but the look in that yeti’s eyes had been a fever, a crazed look that yes, had scared the shit out of Jack, but hadn’t felt like the product of Pitch’s darkness.

Jack glanced down at the spirit at his side and evaluated the thing. Its eyes, which Jack kept his own carefully adverted from, had conjured the strangest sensations when he’d been trapped in them. Had those sensations been fear? Most probably. But the monsters that lived in the Halloween King’s backyard also had the ability to make someone feel jittery with unease. It wasn’t as precise and terrible as the fear Pitch’s Nightmares could conjure, but sometimes it was awfully close.

He cleared his throat and tested his communication skills on the weird little thing. “Do you come from the King’s fields?”

Shock of shocks, the spirit ignored him.

Jack chewed on the inside of his cheek as he reconsidered his question. He leaned in a little and lowered his voice to ask, “Did Pitch make you?”

The spirit stopped trying to make a picture in the mud with its feet and looked up at Jack. He flinched as dark eyes passed over his face, but then the gaze kept travelling. Looking up himself, Jack realised with a scowl that no, it was not his question that had caught the spirit’s attention, but rather a moth that was fluttering around above their heads.

Jack groaned and gave up wasting his breath on the spirit. He straightened up and turned back to his objective, figuring that he might as well try and preserve what little dignity he possessed in case any swamp fae were wallowing nearby laughing at him.

The looming door, made of wood so dark Jack couldn’t tell if it was black or an odd purple colour, sat in a frame made of ornate gold and silver furls so large the structure dwarfed Jack. Hovering an inch above the disgusting slime of the swamp, it looked so obscenely out of place surrounded by pools of sulphuric mud and wilting, yellowing trees that were probably well on their way toward death. Its sore-thumb appeal had literally been the only reason it had caught Jack’s eye as he’d been flying past, and he had nearly sobbed in relief when he’d realised that there was a carving of a fox scrawled over the surface of the doorway.

The little spirit seemed more intrigued by the blue-spotted moth as it chased it in a wide loop that encompassed both the doorframe and Jack. He didn’t bother interrupting its fun as he cracked open the door and stepped through into a cobblestone alley.

The door creaked shut behind him, and Jack took in his surroundings as he walked, from the monstrously tall wooden buildings either side of him to the thin shard of sky swirling a deep orange. The air was cautiously still, almost synthetically so, and Jack suspected the oddly coloured sky wasn’t all that real either. Any window he could spy from his place on the ground was blacked out, and most of the wooden boards that made up the buildings were curling out, as if they were trying to snap themselves off the architecture.

He felt a twinge of power in his staff as he walked toward a large and crumbling sign signalling that the Emporium was down the stairs at the end of the alley. Unfamiliar realms always made Jack’s nerves fray, mostly because he never really knew how powerful their borders were and how much of his own power was muffled as a result. This realm, though, would be doing a perfect job of putting Jack on edge even without that fear. He felt like he should be getting mugged in a place like this, and if not, doing the mugging himself.

_“Frost, if you tried to nick someone’s shit, they’d piss themselves laughing at you and your baby-faced mug.”_

Jack’s eye twitched in irritation at the memory.

The stairwell that led down into the shop was as much of a hazard as the alley. Made of wood that looked well on its way to rotten, the tight descent was lit by only a few candles that flickered viciously as they were passed by. Jack wasn’t sure if he was more worried about ending up with his feet full of splinters or missing a step and falling to his unsavoury death.

_Tooth’s got enough cash lying around for my medical bills._

“Hopefully she’s got some sort of account set up with these people,” Jack muttered to himself as he passed the threshold at the base of the stairs and emerged into the shop.

And was immediately slapped by the change of scenery.

_Holy shit._

The Emporium was one of the most lavish places Jack had ever planted his feet in, and that was saying something considering how much gold Tooth had woven into Punjam Hy Loo. The walls were lined with panels of dark wood so highly polished Jack could practically see his reflection in them, and the ash and ebony floorboards had been bent, somehow, so they created a great swirling spiral which seemed to concentrate somewhere beyond the giant onyx fox statue in the centre of the room.

Jack worked his way past nooks and archways that revealed all manners of objects for sale, from strange animals to stranger weapons and tapestries that moved. He noted the presence of two ladies in hooded crimson cloaks sitting at a large table covered with pots and pouches of herbs, and made a mental note to visit them with Tooth’s shopping list if his headache ever returned.

As he made his way around toward where half a dozen bookcases were nestled in their own little nook with a lowered ceiling, he passed beneath a dazzling amount of light, and glanced up at what was the largest chandelier he had ever seen.

 _That thing could fill the centre of North’s Workshop_ , Jack realised with an impressed little huff.

“Oh, for goodness sake.”

It took Jack’s heart one terribly anxious thump for his brain to recognise the voice that had spoken, and one more to lodge itself up beside its fellow vital organ in shock. Jack whirled, staff raised, his attention tearing in streaks of light to the darkest presence in the room – a presence  _Jack should have noticed_  upon walking through the damn door. For the sake of his peace of mind, Jack did a brief calculation and realised, belatedly, that the fox statue must obstruct the view of anyone sitting at the keeper’s counter – which was exactly where the owner of the voice had spoken from, leaning over the counter with his chin in his hand.

Surprise flittered across his ashen features, and as Jack’s own shock began to dissipate, he could sense the disbelief welling powerfully in the space between the two males.

Inch by inch, Jack’s staff dropped until his hands were hanging limply at his sides. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” he muttered, wishing, not for the first time, that he had just stayed in the snow outside North’s Workshop and bunkered down until his bad luck ran out.

The object of Jack’s sights began tapping long, slender fingers along the side of his face, and Jack swallowed hard as a pair of gold-silver eyes hooked straight into his chest with devastating levels of irritation.

 _This isn’t going to be fun_ , he thought miserably.

The peeved look on Pitch’s face all but confirmed it. “My sentiments exactly.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> oh look! it's Pitch, making a seriously late debut.
> 
> (and thank you for those kudos!! <3)


	4. The Emporium

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Jack does not have a pleasant shopping experience.

_You still look the same._

The thought flittered through Jack’s head before he could put his brain on pause and tell it how stupid it was for even being surprised at the fact.

Ten years ago, the unchanging nature of most of the spirits Jack had encountered had never seemed strange. Humans, on the other hand, had always been ephemeral. They lasted a century max and died by the hundreds whenever the world sought to take back some of its authority. The lifespans of their animals were even shorter. He’d always thought it was so sad that the children he watched over grew up and old and died _so quickly_. Too quickly.

It took regaining his human memories to make Jack realise that not seeing another spirit for a hundred years and witnessing them completely unchanged by time, not a day older physically, was stranger than he had always perceived it to be. Entire human civilizations could rise and burn, individual people and the worlds they inhabit transform and change, all while immortal spirits remained untouched.

_Stagnant_.

Jack’s eyes traced the outline of this same Pitch. His raven hair was as ridiculous as ever, as slick and dangerous and gravity defying as the man himself. His colour scheme was the usual nefarious black, but Jack noticed that his clothes were not the body-hugging robes he used to swish around in. Pitch was wearing a black shirt, button-less but laced across the collarbone with string. The sleeves were rolled up somewhat, revealing a thin strip of his forearms that were dotted, faintly, with dark –

Pitch twitched when he saw that Jack was staring, unabashedly, at what looked to be _tattoos_ on his exposed forearms. He promptly rolled down his sleeves to hide them, and Jack blew out a breath through his nose in disappointment.

_Maybe you’re not the same after all._

Jack peered at Pitch as he leant on his staff. “Let me guess, you gave up your life of crime and decided to get a real job?”

The sneer Pitch sent him was priceless, as was the flash of undiluted annoyance that dashed across his strangely coloured eyes. Under the light of that monstrous chandelier, Pitch almost looked paler than Jack remembered, his complexion less tainted by his old grey hue. His jaw was still as strong as it used to be, though. Unfairly sharp and angular. Perfect for clenching whenever anyone drove him up the wall.

Just as Jack was doing now. “Did you come here purely for drivel, Frost, or to actually buy something?”

The use of his last name made Jack flinch, and when Pitch narrowed his eyes at the motion, the blond looked away and started digging around in his pocket purposefully. It had been a while since anyone aside from his memories had addressed him by his Moon-anointed surname, and in those memories a very different voice had been talking to him. One that was nowhere near as dark and languid as Pitch’s, and one without the smooth tones of his refined accent.

_One that’s probably gonna beat the shit out of me if I ever see him again._

Jack pulled the shard of Tooth’s palace out of his pocket and traced his thumb over the engraved monstrosity of the author’s name. Pitch had called him “Frost” a few times during their skirmishes a decade ago – out of apathy-turned-loathing, no doubt – and Jack hadn’t really appreciated it. It was such a small, _stupid_ thing to be hung up about, but there was a gnawing part of him that wanted people to see him for himself, not for the shitstorms he could create with a cold that was given to him without his permission and winds that weren’t even his.

He didn’t want Pitch talking to him like he was a block of ice the Man in the Moon brought back to life.

_Even though that’s pretty much what you are_ , his mind whispered like the piece of shit it was.

Swallowing back the dark feeling his brain was conjuring, Jack flipped the tile in his hand and pouted. “Don’t be bitter, Pitch. I can do both.”

Pitch rolled his eyes and sat back in his chair. He picked up a large leather-bound book from the counter and cracked it open to a bookmarked page. “ _Brilliant_.”

If Jack’s sarcasm detector was a physical, tangible machine, it would have exploded.

Sighing, he wandered over to the collection of bookcases he had spied earlier. A large floating trellis with some sort of moving yellow vine crawling in and out of its weaves was hovering on the other side of the bookcases, between the literature section and Pitch’s counter. Jack eyed the large, swaying fluorescent leaves as he passed it. When the plant thought Jack had veered a little close for comfort, the thing spat at him.

Instinct alone had Jack dodging the ball of liquefied green that shot out of one of its many buds. And lucky, too, because a moment later the floorboards beneath where the goo had landed began sizzling.

_Acid. Lovely._

“Oh, and beware of the poisonous plant,” Pitch thought to add. He didn’t even raise his head from his damn book, which unfortunately also meant the glare Jack pinned him with was ineffective. Grumbling, Jack stomped into the safety of the bookcases.

“Uh,” Jack said aloud, looking around him at the dust-lined shelves. “Oh shopkeeper, not that I _want_ your help or anything…”

“Just spit it out.”

Jack poked his head around the cases and waved his hands around in exasperation. “There are no books! _None_. Did you guys have a sale or something? Because I was told that this place could give me what I want and there is literally dust _everywhere_ , Pitch. And not a book in sight. Do you even _clean_ these poor cases? I mean, seriously, if you had allergies –”

“The bookcases are _magic_ ,” Pitch interrupted with a snap, scowling over at Jack as if he couldn’t quite tell if Jack was playing dumb or truly a complete idiot.

The frost spirit slowly started to grin, and the expression on Pitch’s face darkened terribly. Jack had to bite back his laughter to keep himself from actually getting maimed. Of course Jack wasn’t stupid enough to think that a shop that sold an acid-spitting vine and thought Pitch Black was fit for a public relations job would be conventional in their stock storage. Granted, though, he _had_ been expecting a little more than half a dozen empty stands of wood.

“So how do I make them work? Do you need to fire them up for me?”

Pitch pinched the bridge of his nose and squeezed his eyes shut. “They are not machines, Frost. Step up to one and think of whatever book you wish to purchase.”

Jack’s eyebrows shot up. “And it’ll appear? Just like that?”

“Yes.”

“And if I don’t know exactly what the book looks like?”

“A generic volume with the author’s name and title will suffice.”

“Awesome,” Jack breathed as he retreated back into the folds of the bookcases.

He faced off with one of the slightly wonky shelves and brought the engraved tile to his face, his eyes scanning over the name written there. _Glad I don’t have to try and pronounce this bullshit out loud_ , he thought as he closed his eyes and imagined a book lettered with this appalling name.

A violent crash had Jack’s eyes snapping open, and when he saw what had become of the once-empty shelf he leapt backwards – only to hit a stack of books behind him. He was surrounded by great big grey and dusty blue tomes of the oldest and most decrepit collection of books. They lined the shelves tightly, top row to bottom, and in any spare space on the floor they were stacked up to Jack’s elbows. The cases were buckling under the weight of them all. Claustrophobia pinched at Jack’s throat, and using the shelves he climbed his way out of the mound of books before he could make a fool out of himself in his panic.

Pitch’s attention had apparently been wrenched away from his engrossing novel when the pile of books had poofed onto the shelves, and was staring over at Jack and all the bookcases like he couldn’t quite understand what he had done to deserve this.

Jack looked down at the tile and made a small noise when there was no volume number written anywhere.

_Shit, what am I supposed to do with all these? Surely Tooth doesn’t want them_ all _?_

He hoped, at any rate, because there was no way he’d be able to carry all those books to the nearest snow globe. And she had spoken of the lexicon in singular form, so surely she only needed _one_ of these books. But if he left the Emporium to go ask Tooth which volume she needed, the damn door would be moved by the time he got back – in fact, it had probably shifted already. He could only hope that he didn’t walk out into a desert or volcano when this was over.

Jack caught a shadow moving near his shoulder, and couldn’t help but jump when saw that Pitch had crept – like the creeper he was – over to where Jack was faced off with all the books. The fucker smirked when he noticed that he’d given Jack a scare, and the frost spirit narrowed his eyes.

Then he looked down. “You have boots, man! Why don’t they make any noise?”

Quite impressive boots, if Jack had to admit it. Of course, he wasn’t a fan of shoes at all, but Pitch’s military-esque boots suited the guy, all tall and black leather with laces that ran all the way up to his knees, where his black pants were tucked into them. They had a bit of a heel on them too, as most military boots did, which should have made a least a little sound on their way across the wooden floors.

Pitch merely waved off the question as he peered at a volume on one of the piles closest to them. “A benefit of the job.”

Jack raised an eyebrow. “Of being a sales clerk?”

Pitch straightened up and looked down at Jack with a gaze that skewered the frost spirit. With a serrated blade. A long, thin, and _rusted_ serrated blade that slammed straight into Jack’s throat, bounced off the floor behind him, and came back mercilessly for his stomach. Pain and discomfort welled, and soon a shred of fear began to bloom in the centre of the pain. He looked pointedly away from that stare, not liking it one bit, and gritted his teeth at his own emotional weakness. If this shit kept up, he’d never be able to look anything in the eye again.

“Of being the _Nightmare King_ , Frost.” Pitch spoke slowly, as if trying to convey the concept to an invalid, and Jack bristled.

But he bit his tongue against the insult he wanted to snap back at the asshole. A surge of tension rolled through his torso, contracting the muscles in his arms and stomach, but Jack forced it to calm the hell down with a pulse of cold. If Pitch was gonna be an ass, then that was his business. Jack could damn well exercise restraint when he wanted to – not that anyone would believe him – and he was going to do it right this second. For the sake of Tooth and her precious palace.

_Ah, but who needs impulse control when a once-in-a-lifetime chance is standing right beside us?_

And with nothing more than that thought spurring him on, Jack’s voice left his mouth without his permission. An amused, “Did they give you an apron when you started working here?” passed through the air between them, and the second it did Jack could have kicked himself.

_Looks like that self-control might have dried up._

Pitch looked utterly disgusted at the idea, utterly disgusted _at Jack_ , and the frost spirit just gave up and added, “And aren’t you meant to be polite to your customers? Call me sir and actually _help_ me?”

There was a graceless sound from the other side of the Emporium, and Jack glanced over his shoulder to see the cloaked ladies gurgling at each other. _Laughing_ , he assumed (and hoped).

Pitch barely spared them a glance before Jack felt way too much of the man’s attention pour down onto his slim shoulders. Cringing, Jack turned back to Pitch and was almost more afraid when he saw that not a sliver of anger was present upon his face.

The man leaned back slightly, tucking his hands behind his back as he regularly used to, and took up a dangerously serene expression. “My apologies, _sir_ ,” he said, his voice dropping until it was so rich and smooth that Jack had to grip his staff tightly to stop himself from shivering.

He watched as Pitch began moving, so casually, toward and around the frost spirit, and Jack had to start breathing methodically through his nose to keep himself calm.

“Would you care for my assistance in retrieving your desired volume?” Pitch murmured in that silken tone. “Or would the sir rather forage through the books on his own? Hm, or perhaps the _gentleman_ –” the word blew straight into Jack’s ear, and he couldn’t suppress the shudder that coasted through his torso “– would like to be shown around the shop?” Pitch eyed Jack as he stopped moving just to the right of the frost spirit, standing so close that Jack could see ice begin to catch on Pitch’s shirt. “The grand tour is most fine, I assure you.” Pitch gravitated forward, advancing with an indecipherable look in his eyes, and Jack had no choice but to start backing up. He looked like a coward, he knew it. But calm and composed Pitch being a scary mother was _terrifying_ and Jack didn’t have the wits about him to try and shake out the fear he was feeling with any degree of humour.

His back hit one of the decorative poles that surrounded the kitsune statue, and Pitch didn’t stop until he was unquestionably _looming_ over Jack.

_Goddamn he’s tall_ , Jack thought as his very existence began to compress. It was literally worse than being under North’s scrutiny, because at least Jack was pretty sure North wouldn’t outright kill him if he pissed the old man off.

Pitch, though? Pitch was definitely the killing kind.

His breath stopped when Pitch’s face got right up close to his. Jack ducked his head, his eyes locking onto the still-bubbling acid pool just behind Pitch. _Breathe, Jack_ , he whispered to himself. _This is a public place, there are_ witnesses _, he can’t –_

“Unless,” Pitch murmured, his warm breath stirring the wisps of fringe that fell across Jack’s cheek. He flinched at the sound and the sensation, goose bumps prickling over the soft skin near his ear. “You would like me to show you something different. Something _wet_ , perhaps.”

Eyes widening, Jack’s mind lurched, jumping to a thousand conclusions at once. Only a few didn’t completely terrify him, and he could have punched himself in the head for even having a shred of hope that maybe, just maybe, Pitch wasn’t as much of a villain as everyone gave him credit for. His gaze whirled upwards as he choked out a startled, “ _What_?!”

Pitch just stared down at Jack in response, the gold strung around his pupils wavering and glimmering like North’s borealis.

And then he heard the sound of rushing water, turbulent and violent, and Jack peeled his alarmed stare away from Pitch’s to see crystal water pouring into the Emporium’s foyer from all the small archways on the walls.

_What the hell is this?_

His limbs twitched, itching to get away from the killing substance that was bucketing in so _rapidly_ , but he forced himself to hold fast as water began to pool around his bare feet. He told himself to breathe. _This is just Pitch. His fear. It isn’t real, how can it possibly be real? It isn’t –_

The water was up to Jack’s waist, sodding his pants and skin as it pushed against him, trying to drag him in the direction it was flowing. His knees nearly buckled, his hand shooting out to the pole behind him to support himself. 

_I’m not going under again,_ he hissed to himself, his breath picking up along with his heartbeat. The sound of the water was deafening, and Jack felt terror burn his lungs like lack of oxygen. The water was roaring, furiously seeking the individual it held one of its most aggressive of grudges against – the boy whose breath it once stole, but who refused to die.

He needed to escape.

_This is just a hallucination_ , his mind reminded him. _Just Pitch. It can’t kill us. It isn’t_ real _._

Panicking blue eyes flew to the man at the helm of the rising tide in some vain hope that the guy might own a lick of mercy, but Pitch looked like he couldn’t care less about Jack’s call for compassion. Instead, there was an intensity about his gaze, as if he was… searching. He was frowning, staring in through Jack’s eyes as if he could actually _see_ –

_Oh god_.

With a panicked noise, Jack clamped his eyes shut and turned away from Pitch. He needed to get away from Pitch, get out of his proximity so he could _think_ without feeling so much _fear_. Jack slammed his staff down into the water, dismayed when he opened his eyes saw that the small blast of frost he could manage with his scattering thoughts was utterly useless against the fictional water.

Fictional water that felt _so real_.

_It’s not. It’s not real._ He gritted his teeth and looked around at the rest of the room, swallowing when he saw tables upturned and crashing against one another in the imagined sea. He was _not_ going to lose to this. Not to some hallucination conjured by the Asshat King. He went to dig his staff into the floorboards so he could use it as a cane to keep himself upright, but a sudden brutal gush of water slapped the thing right from his grip.

“No!” he yelled, about to jump in after his staff when he was pulled short, suddenly, by what he saw out of the corner of his eye.

A large shape was floating by on the surface of the water, and Jack’s heart clenched painfully when he realised what it was. And suddenly he didn’t care anymore if this shit was real or not. One slicked hand gripping the pole he was using as a life support, he tried to grab at Pitch with his other so he could fight his way out of the hallucinated hell the asshole was trying to murder him in. But his arm was shaking, his tendons tightening and his vision was starting to blur. The best he could do was barely brush the tips of his fingers against the black cotton of Pitch’s shirt. The soft fibres fell out of his reach, and Jack whimpered.

“Pitch,” he croaked, eyes glued to the body floating closer and closer to him. “Pitch, stop, _please_.”

The water climbed to Jack’s chest and he struggled to breathe. The shape had floated horrifyingly close, and long strands of clumped, burnt hair were bobbing dangerously close to Jack’s body. His legs were no longer a functioning part of his body; they’d locked into place to keep him from entering the water, and so all he could do was stare in horror at the streaks of ash slashed across the body’s tattered clothing.

“Pitch, stop. _STOP!_ ”

There was no response, no reprieve. More floating figures appeared on the sloshing water, lifeless limbs being unnaturally moved by the violent current. The smell of burnt flesh filled his nostrils and Jack’s eyes began to water. He couldn’t deal with this. It was enough. Pitch had made his point. It was _enough_.

He faced Pitch and hardly cared that his voice came out as nothing more than a pathetic sob. “I’m _sorry_ , Pitch. Please just make this stop. I can’t – _please_.”

Pitch’s forehead was pinched in concentration, his staring eyes a moving mess of silver melting into gold melting into a thick black that made Jack’s chest scream. _He didn’t hear me. He can’t hear me. I’m going to drown –_

The water grew quiet around them, still carrying its passengers in towards Jack, but its sound became muffled, distant. A crack of snapping bone broke through the dim gushing of water, and long stick-thin limbs emerged from behind Pitch and began curling around and onto the king’s face. Jack’s broken breath was punched back down his throat. Sharp black talons moved straight for Pitch’s eyes, his slightly parted lips.

_Pitch needs to move. I need to move. Oh god._

The water had just begun crawling into Jack’s mouth, tasting of the rotting dead and cold ash, when the razor thin points of the talons peeled up from Pitch’s face and gradually curled inwards, four venomous snakes preparing to attack. The spikes were going to dig straight into flesh, force their way straight down Pitch’s throat. As the uninvited water rasped against Jack’s throat, a very different kind of fear tightened in his chest.

He hacked the water out of his mouth as the spikes reared back to strike. Pitch’s eyes widened and Jack screamed, “PITCH!”

The claws preparing to mutilate Pitch froze, then almost grudgingly began to uncurl. They retracted, returning to the nowhere they had emerged from. The water and the bodies disappeared, vanishing so fast that Jack had to blink a few times to make sure that his eyes weren’t deceiving him, that the tables were still where they were meant to be and Jack was still alive.

Only when he was sure he was safe did he finally allow his knees to buckle. Jack fell, useless, to the dry hard floor. He heaved, the disgusting taste of the water still in his mouth. He’d known for a while that Pitch had a despicable amount of tricks up his black sleeves, and his talent for conjuring hallucinations had been coldly mentioned once by Tooth and Bunny, who’d both experienced it centuries ago. But they’d never told him how truly powerful it was. How those silver and gold eyes just dug right into the brain and pulled out anything they pleased and created such a _real_ copy of it. Jack dragged his hands over his face, digging them into his skin to try and stop their trembling. _Shit_.

“Apology accepted.”

Jack glared up through his shaking fingers. His staff, his all-important channel for Winter’s magic, had mercifully fallen not two feet away from Jack, obviously not having been carried away by any kind of tide. A splattering of frost lay beneath it, and Jack winced, hoping the ice would melt without ruining the wooden flooring. Keeping one eye on the bastard in front of him – who was frowning down at Jack with a _curious_ expression of all things – Jack picked up his staff and aimed it right at Pitch’s chest as he unsteadily got to his feet.

“You get off on shit like that?” he snarled, angry at how terrified he was. At how he still shook, even though the water had receded.

Jack’s anger put a smirk on the asshole’s face. “Very much so,” Pitch purred, looking entirely too pleased with himself. He turned for the counter once again, waving toward the bookcases over his shoulder. “Dig through your volumes on fae languages, Frost. I won’t try my little trick on you again.”

Jack sniffed. “Why should I believe you?”

In the blandest tone imaginable, Pitch bluntly said, “Because it is taxing and I don’t find you worth the trouble.”

Absurdly enough, Jack was a little irked at Pitch’s answer. But then his common sense kicked in and a burst of relief fluttered through his ribcage, chasing away the last remnants of fear still clinging to his organs. Or, well, most of it at least. “Then why do it in the first place,” Jack muttered as he walked, warily, back over to his mound of books.

The cloaked ladies over in the herbal department had long stopped gurgling at Pitch’s expense, and even though Jack couldn’t see their faces, he could feel their stares following him as he walked. It was unnerving.

Just as he was about to go diving for hopefully a helpful volume, Jack was pulled up short by a thought. “Wait, you know of these books?

Pitch glided in his usual shady fashion around the counter and sat himself back down in a coat-draped seat. “ _The Compendium on Natural Born and Naturalised Languages of All the Fae Realm_ is not one most readers forget. Its author was deranged.” And then he proceeded to pronounce the name on Jack’s tile, the letters rolling of his tongue so smoothly it shamed the muddled pronunciation Jack had been mentally stumbling through for this last week.

Jack licked his lips. Fuck, he didn’t want to ask for Pitch’s help. He seriously didn’t, not with the stunt the guy just pulled and the dignity, oh god, _the dignity_ Jack had sacrificed only to unsuccessfully free himself. Even if he reluctantly supposed that he’d _technically_ started the fight in the first place with his lack of filter, Pitch’s shitshow was seriously excessive as punishment. He felt like walking out of the Emporium, leaving the giant black door open and summoning an ice storm to waft on in here and ruin the displays. The furniture. Pitch’s hair.

_But I’m not here for me_ , Jack had to remind himself. He was here to help _Tooth_. The cold tongue in his mouth swallowed his indignation and his anger and he cleared his throat, hoping that his voice sounded a hell of a lot more civil than he felt. “Which…”

Pitch looked at him expectantly, one brow hiking. Jack pushed out a breath and blurted, “Which volume would you recommend?”

If Pitch was surprised by Jack’s sudden faith in his opinion, he didn’t show it. “That depends on which language you wish to translate.”

Jack bit his lip. Tooth hadn’t seemed to have a solid idea of what she was looking at when she’d directed him to these books, and for the life of Jack he couldn’t accurately recognise any of those letters on her walls to try and place the language. At least, he thought he couldn’t. Some of the symbols had looked familiar, but considering there were apparently enough faerie languages to fill a small library worth of books, Jack figured the fae couldn’t be beyond recycling letters in the construction of new alphabets. He’d probably seen distant, unrelated replicas of those symbols slashed elsewhere.

“I imagine this isn’t for you,” Pitch remarked.

Jack barely refrained from scowling. He didn’t know whether to be offended at that or not. After all, who was Pitch to assume that Jack wasn’t some sort of closet scholar with a penchant for travelling to mystical faerie villages in the name of research?

Any cause for his indignation began to dry up the more he imagined himself as a man of books. Then he pictured himself in glasses and a tweed coat and snorted. “No,” he said finally.

Surprisingly, Pitch didn’t make any smart remarks. In a matter-of-fact tone, he instead said, “Volume three-hundred-and-eighty-nine recaps all the important aspects of the previous volumes and is the final book before he starts delving into the more obscure languages. It will be the most helpful until you know what language specifically you wish to translate.”

Jack gave a single nod before tilting his head so he could read the spines of the tomes. It wasn’t long before he realised that not a single number adorned any of the books, the volumes labelled with letters instead. Jack flushed, embarrassed at his own uselessness, and after looking around helplessly for a few minutes, began to meekly say, “I can’t –”

“CCCLXXXIX.”

A breath of self-depreciating laughter escaped Jack’s lips at the sound of Pitch’s instant reply, as if the man had been just _waiting_ for Jack to own up to his complete ineptitude. His embarrassment burned coldly in his eyes as he scavenged through the books. Tiredness washed through his temples and shoulders, and he just wanted to be finished with this job so he could be alone again. He’d been searching for the Emporium non-stop for a whole week only to find it and be psychologically wrecked by its keeper. And then reminded, ever so subtly, that despite having survived three whole centuries on this earth, he was still as dumb as a rock.

Jack found the volume he needed and vaulted over the pile of books blocking his exit way. He was going to find a nice tree somewhere a sleep for a bit, he decided. Not a long time, not like he used to. But he was going to rest and piece his mind back together again and then go out into the world and make the snow days he frankly deserved. And he’d feel better for it.

There was a cheer inside of him at the thought of getting back to the fun he’d stopped having three weeks ago. It warmed him, just a little.

Jack slapped the book down on the sapphire-coloured stone counter and stared Pitch down as the man leisurely looked up at his customer. “How much is this gonna cost me?”

Pitch glanced thoughtfully down at the book, as if thinking up some sort of pricing for the item. Jack had the itching feeling that he was going to get majorly ripped-off in this transaction. While he was silent, Jack eyed the massive novel the man held in his own hands and spied a gold title imprinted into the spine.

He frowned, momentarily distracted from his anger by the familiarity of the lettering. “What’s that book about?”

The book in question snapped shut, and Pitch placed it onto his lap, spine facing away from Jack. “It’s about an obnoxious frost spirit who sticks his head into too many dark places.”

_I’m obnoxious now, am I? Charming._

Jack’s head tilted as he appraised Pitch, the touch of a smirk that never made it onto his face lacing his words as he spoke. “The sequel was better. You know, the one where the Boogeyman has a romance fetish and the reason his evil lair is so hard to navigate is to prevent his enemies from finding his extensive collection of cowboy smut.”

There was a moment of quiet while Pitch’s eyes slid a little to the right, was if he was trying to imagine the logistics of the bullshit Jack was proposing. Eventually, the eyes rolled back to Jack and he snorted.

Jack’s fingers splayed on the rough cover of his lexicon. “How much?” he prompted.

“A ten-gallon hat and your soul.”

“Ha, yeah, funny Pitch, you’re a riot. Be fucking serious, please.”

Pitch went quiet in thought again before eventually asking, “Was the shard you were using as a shopping list from the Tooth Palace?”

Jack scoffed. “As if you didn’t recognise it.” _Bastard_.

Pitch just gave him an unimpressed look and held out his hand, expectantly. “The tile will pay for the book.”

Jack quirked an eyebrow at that. “Seriously? Is that all you want? Are you sure this isn’t just the beginning of your grand scheme of taking over the world again?”

A sigh escaped Pitch’s lips and he lowered his hand back to his novel. “The mistress of the Emporium collects artefacts. She would find value, even if only sentimental, in something from a palace she greatly admires the architectural work of.”

Jack extracted the tile from his pocket and glanced over the neatly-cut rose diamond. He gave Pitch a suspicious look. “You being real with me?”

“If you do not believe me, then you are free to leave. _Without_ your hard-earned work.”

Jack huffed, his concern about handing over a piece of Tooth’s _magical_ palace teamed with Pitch’s infuriating existence wearing his patience paper thin. “Well excuse me for having my doubts about the authenticity of a guy who tried to _mentally drown_ _me_ a second ago. How do I know that you’re not going to use the magic this thing _most certainly_ has in it to do something to hurt Tooth?”

The corner of Pitch’s eye twitched, minutely, and a look settled over his face that made Jack’s throat go dry. “The magic imbued within the tile dissolves the moment it is removed from Punjam Hy Loo,” he told Jack coldly. “Even if it was my wish to, as you say, take over the world, I certainly could not do so wielding nothing more than a shard of glass.”

A strange look dashed through Pitch’s eyes when he seemed to extract something from his own words. But Jack had no idea what that look meant, what he hadn’t picked up on, and frankly he didn’t care. His conscience – if it was still around – was telling him, reluctantly, that Pitch was probably telling the truth. And anyway, if this was seriously all some ploy to make a comeback, he could have grabbed Jack’s staff while the frost spirit was still hacking up faux fluid and re-enacted the final part of their one-time conversation in Antarctica.

He handed the tile over to the asshole, letting go of the glass just before Pitch touched it so the shard fell right in his hands. Stomach clenching with the hope that he hadn’t just made a serious mistake, Jack collected up Tooth’s new book and mumbled an obligatory, “Thank you.”

Like the very winds he could summon, Jack was out of the Emporium before Pitch could even process some sort of snappy remark. He accidentally brushed past another customer on the dark stairway, and apologised profusely when he saw that frost had jumped from his clothing to their coat (to which the stranger just laughed, politely, and brushed the frost right off).

He didn’t breathe properly again until he was out of the decrepit alleyway and burst through the magical doorway back into the real world. His feet landed on soft, damp grass as his eyes refocused to take in his dark surroundings. He gazed up and saw the Moon, large and full and unbelievably bright as it cast silver beams onto the blades of grass licking at Jack’s ankles. He inhaled, breathing in the smell of lush grass and night-time and the scent of freshly-passed rain.

A small white shadow jumped by Jack’s feet, and he stared down at the little ghost spirit, barely surprised that the thing had managed to find him.

It began skipping around Jack as if it was happy to see him again, and Jack, whether it was out of relief of being free or just because his brain was lacking its usual wits, found himself smiling.

“You’re not too bad after all,” he told the spirit.

A single blast of wind shot straight past Jack and the spirit, ruffling the hair on both and nearly sending Jack on his ass. He turned, slowly, and saw that the doorway to the Emporium had vanished.

 

* * *

  

Pitch was still trying to recollect himself once Jack Frost had all but sprinted out of the shop. Obviously the earth wasn’t large enough to avoid all the people he hated – and heavens was there _a lot_ of people he despised – but he had done an excellent job of keeping a low profile for a long time now. Almost too good of a job, he would reason, if not for the astonished expression he’d found on Frost’s irritating face the first time they’d beheld one another.

Oh, and his face _was_ just so _irritating_. It reminded him, without even trying to, that his best laid plans had been wasted _once again_ by a bunch of morons spouting rubbish about goodness and saving the children. Pitch’s lip curled in distaste and he ran his fingers back through his hair in frustration.

“Pitch, darling, don’t screw your face up like that. It’s unbecoming.”

The addressed man looked up with a jolt and saw the owner of the shop stomping, in her utterly graceful manner, toward where he sat behind the counter. The kitsune Inari was a fine fox-spirit, as elegant and traditional as she was cunning and, even to Pitch’s standards, terrifying. Her facial structure, although that of a fox’s, was impeccable, her fur dark around amber eyes and stark white beneath her jaw. Gold rings lined both of her ears, each dangling with a jewel that glimmered a different colour in the light of her chandelier. She shook off her thick velvet coat, and tossed the emerald garment onto the counter right in front of Pitch. A sleeve landed in the folds of his novel, and he flicked the obstructing material away distastefully.

Hopping up onto the counter – she did own the place, after all – Inari tucked her paws into the sleeves of her aquamarine kimono and battered long eyelashes at Pitch. “I just saw the most delicious little spirit fly on out of here,” she purred, exposing some teeth in a sly manner. “Tell me you sold him something.”

“A book,” Pitch told her, slipping the rose tile out of the previous page of his novel before handing it over to his temporary boss. She snatched it out of his fingers with lightning reflexes, and Pitch had to bite his lip against a smirk as Inari began to run her delicate paws over its surface.

“From the Tooth Palace? Oh, Pitch! I knew I hired you for a reason.”

“I would like to take this moment and point out that being hired means I should actually be getting _paid_.”

Inari’s smile was innocent and completely untrustworthy. “Well isn’t it lucky then that I was just speaking figuratively.”

Pitch rolled his eyes. He was about to immerse himself back into his story – and finally get around to actually _finishing_ the chapter he was swimming in – when a flash of light stung his eyes.

He scowled up at Inari, who had used the tile’s semi-reflective surface to redirect some chandelier light straight into Pitch’s retinas.

“Tell me Pitch,” Inari said, her glee tucked away momentarily in exchange for an air of severe authority. Greater men than Pitch had been cleaved by the look she was currently sporting in her liquid gold eyes, but Pitch had known Inari for a long time now. He _knew_ that look, the fear and submission it was meant to conjure. He knew it because it wasn’t too different from his own. “Why did that pretty little customer reek of fear when he was leaving?” She pointed the tile over her shoulder toward the statue of herself. “And why is there a frost stain on my floors?”

Wet, garbled sounds were exchanged between those suspicious weed-gatherers across the room, and it took everything Pitch had not to glare over at them. All day long all they did was gossip to each other, and usually Pitch was good with tuning out idle banter, but their voices were so disturbing it was impossible to shut the sound out. They sounded as if they were trying to communicate underwater and were failing terribly.

“What did you do to him, Pitch,” Inari pressed, poking his novel with a sharp corner of the tile.

Pitch sighed. “He’s an old acquaintance. His sudden appearance…surprised me.”

Inari’s eyes widened comically. “Oooh, the great and frightful Nightmare King caught off guard? I should award the poor dear a medal.” Her paw traced over the engraving on the tile and Inari thoughtfully added, “Is he the one you told me about?”

Pitch stiffened. Cautiously, he hedged, “You and your diligent interest in my business have pried a few of my nemeses out of me.”

Mercilessly, Inari tucked the tile up one of her sleeves and levelled Pitch with a look that told him not to test her. “The frost spirit. The one you said was also abandoned by the moon. The one you tried to _befri_ –”

Pitch abruptly snapped his book shut and stood, rising to his full and impressive height and towering over the small fox spirit. Inari was completely unconcerned by Pitch’s deteriorating mood. So unconcerned, in fact, that she pulled out a teacup filled with steaming green tea from her sleeve and began sipping at it.

“If you’ve returned for the day,” he ground out as she blew to cool the tea she had just procured from somewhere near her elbow, “I will be leaving.”

“If that is what you wish, Pitch Black,” she said with a shrug. “But if you plan on going around scaring poor humans today, I suggest you wipe that look out of your eyes.”

Pitch scowled at her as he swung his coat onto his shoulders, not bothering with putting his arms in the sleeves. Since his defeat at the hands of the Guardians, and the subsequent power loss, his ability to control his shadows had diminished substantially. The robes he used to wear, flowing and seamless and knitted together with pure darkness, began to malfunction badly soon after and he’d had to acquire actual garments to cover his pale skin and tattoos.

The coat, pried from the still-fresh corpse of a recently murdered rebel in one of the most politically dire sectors of the fae realm, was Pitch’s best find. He was quite proud of it, if he was to be honest. After ripping off all the rebellion slogans and giving it a good wash, he’d been left with a calf-length black coat made of strips of some sort of leather and a soft black fibre. It reminded him of a time when he used to wear a uniform to helm armies, rather than having to wear one because his legions had abandoned him.

He still wasn’t sure if the nostalgia was welcome or not, but it gave him a sense of himself again. And in this wretched world, keeping a hold of his own self was something he felt he needed to do.

“And what look might that be?” he bit, not even bothering with civility.

Inari didn’t care, anyway. When they’d first met, she’d been convinced that he was some skeevy figure of darkness with no emotional capacity. Every time she riled him up, he proved her wrong and he could always tell by the delighted look on her face that she thought his attitude was great.

“That cute little look of confusion. Ooh, or is it confliction. Did you and your little friend have a moment, Pitch? Because you certainly don’t look like you just confronted someone you once ranted for a solid hour about hating.”

Appalled at every word that had just come out of the fox spirit’s mouth, Pitch growled. Inari laughed, and all he wanted to do was smack that tea right out of her hand and storm off. Sometimes the woman managed to spout the most nauseating words that he could barely stand being around her.

Especially when she was right.

Pitch shook his head at her as he stalked on out of the Emporium, past the spitting vine and the mess of ice that was beginning to melt into a puddle around Inari’s statue. When Pitch had pulled his fear hallucination on Frost, it had been meant to put the shit back in his place. Of course Pitch wasn’t going to just let some little brat of a spirit walk on into a place that he’d been – albeit uncomfortably – minding for the last decade and talk down to him just because he wasn’t standing on rooftops trying to murder the children of the world anymore. He was still the Nightmare King, the king of fear and darkness, and if that meant going a little overboard on Frost – and on his own power – to remind him, then so be it.

Pitch’s feet slowed half way up the stairwell, drawing him to a stop in the dimness. Frost’s fear had given him an extra boost of energy he’d direly needed, and Pitch had thought nothing of what Frost had been terrified of as he’d wracked the brat’s brain for fodder.

But then he’d found that creature, the monster that had chosen to target _Pitch_ instead of Frost, and Pitch had felt that shift in fear so potently it had sent a chill straight to his bones.

_“PITCH!”_

That hadn’t been fear for himself – hadn’t been fear of anything Pitch had been trying to frighten him with. It hadn’t even been fear of the creature.

No. What had blasted from Frost so unexpectedly and violently had been fear _for_ Pitch – a feeling that Pitch hadn’t tasted on another in such a very, very long time.

It unsettled the Nightmare King more than he wished to admit.

 


	5. The Crows Begin to Caw

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Jack's hard labour isn't over yet, and he hasn't checked his calendar in a while.

“I’m sick of hearing your bullshit, Tooth!”

In the foyer of the Tooth Palace, Jack pulled up short at the sound of Bunny cursing. His eyes rose to one of the platforms above him and narrowed when he saw Tooth’s back as she hovered precariously close to the edge of one of her own towers.

“What’s that damn kangaroo yelling about?” Jack muttered to himself. He had half a mind to fly up there and boot the idiot right off the platform for yelling at poor Tooth, but the tiniest logical part of him that respected social etiquette told him that he probably shouldn’t. Not yet, anyway.

“Bunny,” Tooth said. She sounded frustrated and maybe a little upset. “I don’t know what North has told you –”

“He’s told me nothing!” Bunny growled. “That’s my problem! The two of you have been yacking like a pair of kookaburras and all I’ve heard is that I shouldn’t worry about this, I shouldn’t be concerned with that. Well I ain’t taking that, Tooth. There’s something going down and you two are being flaming idiots if you think that keepin’ me out of the loop is a good idea!”

“We just –”

“It’s cute that you’re so hurt about being left out of the gossip, little rabbit, but is throwing a tantrum really necessary?”

And there was Vanish.

Jack barely restrained a snort at the sound of her voice, infused with all that damn attitude, and decided that, for the safety of all involved, it was probably best if he took a higher ground during this argument. In case anyone needed to be iced out of the arena, of course. It had nothing at all to do with his mounting curiosity.

_Ha_.

He noticed a cloud of Baby Teeth soaring up towards one of the higher towers, and summoned a wind to carry him up with them, masking his movement behind theirs. When he found a platform just barely overlooking the one Vanish and Tooth were facing off Bunny on, he dropped out of the clump of twittering Baby Teeth and perched himself on a sweeping arch.

Of course, Vanish noticed his presence immediately. With the eyesight of a genetically enhanced hawk, her amethyst eyes locked onto his in an instant. Jack was caught, for a moment, by the sheer intensity of that look, and nearly fell off the tower as he was settling in.

It had been a few years since she had last come to visit Tooth – a few years since Vanish and Jack had almost burnt down one of the lower levels of the palace during a failed experiment Vanish liked to call “The Incident” – but she was still just a slightly younger splitting image of her sister. Only with her hip cocked and a whole lot of sass.

_So much time goes by and none of us change_ , Jack thought, remembering, with a small frown, that he had thought the same thing upon seeing Pitch in the Emporium.

Vanish was hovering a few paces in front of Tooth, her arms crossed over her chest in a fiercely protective stance. Bunny, in his usual get up, was beginning to pace in his agitation, throwing his paw over his ears as if he was trying to slick back his non-existent hair. The move reminded Jack, for some absurd reason, of Pitch and his gravity defying mop. If Pitch was one for frustrated gestures – Jack figured he probably wasn’t, considering how composed he could keep himself when Jack was riling him up – finger-carding would most definitely account for all those angles his hair stuck up at.

“That move would look better on Pitch, anyway,” he murmured. A pang in his abdomen told him how stupid the sentiment sounded, but considering no one was close enough to listen in and judge him for his musings, he didn’t care.

Jack extracted himself from his own head and noticed that Vanish’s attention had transferred back to the conversation at hand. He exhaled a cold breath.

Bunny grunted in her direction, still pacing. “I don’t need to be lectured by a stroppy fledgling who’s barely grown all her feathers in.”

“The only child here is you, Pooka.”

Bunny whipped out one of his boomerangs threateningly. “You wanna fight, Vanish?”

Tooth put her head in her hands as if she was trying to calm herself. “Look, both of you –”

Bunny whirled on her, stabbing a boomerang in her direction. “Why won’t you and North tell me what’s going on? I’ve seen the state of your palace, Tooth. You’ve got Buckley’s chance of me believing that those markings are new decorations. And after the trouble that went down at the Workshop the other week, this all seems like too much of a coincidence.”

Jack’s eyebrows drew together. Floating above the swamp outside the Emporium, he’d sort of come to a similar conclusion. But his hypothesis didn’t add up – and furthermore, the mastermind he’d thought to blame was working as a shop attendant. If Pitch was seriously trying to make a comeback, why would he have gotten himself a job? Unless he was being sneaky. Jack chewed on his lip. But there had seemed to be genuine surprise on Pitch’s face when they’d first seen one another, surely Pitch wasn’t that good of an actor. _Right_?

His mind merely offered him a questioning hum in response.

“Is it Pitch?” Bunny suddenly asked. Jack jolted a little, and Vanish’s eyes flickered in his direction, noting the movement. Bunny tucked his weapon behind his back and continued on, “Has he come back? Because if this is his work we have to stop him while we still can.”

“It has nothing to do with Pitch, Bunny,” Tooth sighed. Jack swallowed a strange feeling that had been rising in his throat, a tiny piece of him relieved that Tooth was in general consensus with his gut feeling. “You don’t need to –”

“Then tell me what’s going on! If all those teeth weren’t rattling around in your noggin, you’d remember that we’re meant to stand _together_ as Guardians.”

“How dare you,” Vanish snapped with a scowl.

“Jack.”

Jack flinched at the sound of name, his heart jolting at the thought that he’d been found out by Tooth or Bunny. But then his mind processed the direction the voice was calling him from and his attention was pulled from the argument before him. Over his shoulder, his eyes landed on the tower ruined by those crazy black letters, and his grip on the lexicon tightened.

“Come, Jack.”

Rasping. Itching. His legs twitched. Drawing his staff close to his chest, Jack watched as the writing began to move, to ebb and flow. It beckoned him, gently, like a tide trying to draw its prey to a watery death. A familiar ache bloomed in the back of his skull. His throat went dry.

“Find me.”

Using his staff for support, Jack wobbled to his feet. His legs felt heavy, the pain in his head raced down his spine and caused every movement to be followed by a sharp pang. It was as if his body was telling him to sit his ass back down…

_It is, moron._

…but it couldn’t be. It wasn’t. Because Jack needed to walk, needed to fly, needed to fall to his knees in that black writing and drag himself –

“ _ASTER_.”

Tooth’s voice shattered through Jack’s trance and drew the entire palace into a deathly silence. On the verge of stepping off his platform, Jack pulled his leg back to himself and turned back to the fight below him. The pain in his head and neck dissipated.

Vanish had her head turned slightly toward her sister, and even from where Jack stood he could see smug pride in that gaze. Tooth’s hands were balled at her sides in tiny fists as she spoke to an Easter Bunny who looked so taken back Jack thought the Pooka might faint. “Do not think that my hospitality is so encompassing that I’ll sit by and let guests speak down to me in my own home. If you have enough spare time to come harass me and my sister over a conspiracy that may well be a figment of your imagination, you should be in North’s Workshop helping him prepare for Christmas.”

Jack’s own breath faltered a little at the deadly tone in Tooth’s voice. He was so used to the usually chirpy Toothiana that he’d forgotten how fearsome she could be when the situation demanded it of her.

Looking successfully admonished, Bunny grumbled something in Tooth’s direction, and Vanish shooed him off with a mean smirk. “Hop along then.”

The Pooka glared at the younger of the two before turning a frown onto Tooth. “When you and North realise you’ve made a big bloody mistake and you need my help, you know where to find me.”

Tooth said nothing in reply, and Bunny, taking his leave, leapt like an acrobat from the platform and was out of Jack’s line of sight in a heartbeat. As soon as he was gone, Tooth slapped her palms to her cheeks and began muttering something to herself that Jack couldn’t hear. Vanish turned to her sister, eyes widening.

“Sis,” she said softly, kindly.

Tooth took a deep breath and exhaled loudly. “I have to get back to work,” she told Vanish before flying off to attend to her workers.

Vanish stared after her sister in concern, and Jack turned, for a brief moment, back to the writing he had been so beckoned by just earlier.

_What the hell was up with that?_

The writing hadn’t had any sort of effect on him when Tooth had first called him over after he’d woken up, but then again he’d still been trying to retighten all the screws in his head after a major technical malfunction.

Maybe he had lost a few permanently and was hearing voices as a result.

_Wouldn’t that just be delightful?_

But those words…

“ _Come find me, Jack_.”

He shivered and remembered the first time he’d heard them, back in that dark room with the cold chest at North’s. The potency of the voice hadn’t been as strong this time, hadn’t scraped raw the interior of his veins, but it had definitely been the same call.

_Does that mean…?_

His eyes narrowed.

“You know, it’s rude to listen in on other people’s arguments.”

Jack’s gaze snapped down to Vanish, who was staring up at him now with a playful little smirk. Wiping the suspicion off his face, he grinned at her. “I was sitting in the wings in case you guys needed backup.”

She grimaced. “A few jeers directed at that asshole wouldn’t have gone astray.”

“And deprive you of your spotlight?”

That brought a smile to her lips. It was gone in a flash, though, and replaced with an arched brow and a cocked chin. “What, you bought yourself a book and suddenly you’re using all your fancy words?”

But Jack wasn’t letting go of their previous conversation that easily. He floated down beside Vanish and leaned against his staff as he stared holes into her. “What did Bunny want?”

Vanish took on a defensive, hands-on-hips stance under Jack’s scrutiny, but the frost spirit knew it was just for show. Vanish was hopeless when it came to keeping other people’s interesting secrets. She had much more fun divulging them to Jack so the two of them could concoct priceless blackmail fodder. “Tooth won’t tell me,” she huffed with a small, concerned sigh. Her eyes wandered off, presumably after her sister. Then they snapped back to Jack and she zoomed toward him unexpectedly. Jack barely refrained from spooking at her quick movements – he would never hear the end of it if she saw him flinch – and forced himself to breathe deeply.

_It’s just Vanish. She’s not gonna hurt us…too badly._

“Jack,” a voice rasped.

Jack’s gaze shot to Vanish, who was now hovering quite close to him, to see if she had heard the dry, brittle voice. But she was talking away to him, her arms moving about in extravagant gestures, oblivious. Jack watched as her lips moved and no sound passed between them and his shoulders tightened, painfully, as the voice tried to coax him back over to the ruined tower.

“Shut up,” he growled under his breath.

Vanish, who Jack was definitely not talking to, clamped her mouth shut at once with an appalled look on her face. “What did you just say to me?”

Oh shit.

Jack put his hands out between them, one with his staff and the other holding the book, in an effort not only to placate the faerie but also protect his own life. “No no, Vanish, I wasn’t talking to you.”

“Then who were you talking to! There’s no one else here.”

Fuck. She definitely didn’t hear the voice.

“Myself?” he tried.

Vanish rolled her eyes. “Were you listening to anything I just said?”

_Safe_ , he internally sighed. His shoulders collapsed in relief. “Recap the highlights for me?”

“Why haven’t I killed you yet?” Vanish asked herself. In a louder voice, she declared, “I _said_ that ever since North gave Tooth this chest thing to look after – I saw a pair of yetis dragging it in while you were still sleeping at the Workshop – Bunny’s been over here on her back about all these secret meetings Tooth and the big man seem to be having.” She leaned in conspiratorially, but Jack was already too gone to react accordingly. The chest, she had said. What were the chances that it was the same one Jack had found in North’s attic – the same chest North had seemed so nervous about? Maybe nervous enough to have it moved in light of the little spirit raiding the Workshop. “I mean, you Guardians get together for boring meetings a lot, don’t you? I don’t see why the stupid rabbit has to make such a big deal out of a piece of furniture and being left out of the loop.”

“Did they put the chest in that tower up there?” Jack asked, ignoring Vanish’s added commentary and pointing his staff over his shoulder at the ruined tower behind him.

Vanish nodded. “And the writing appeared the next night. I don’t trust whatever it is, but when I told Tooth that we should ditch it she bit my face off.”

Jack swallowed. That didn’t sound like Tooth at all. But at least Vanish was generous enough with her gossip that Jack could more or less confirm his hunch that the voice was indeed associated with the cold chest from North’s. But the chest had never left any writing over the Workshop, Jack realised as he glanced over his shoulder. And if it had, the black ink seemed to be expansive enough that surely Jack would have encountered a segment of it during his explorations of the Workshop.

So why had it decided to make its presence known now?

_More importantly, why is it talking to you now?_

Jack glanced down at the tome in his hand, then extended it toward Vanish. “Tooth might be more inclined to let it go if she knows what the writing says. Can you pass this along to her when she’s calmed down a little?”

Vanish eyed the book as if it had just personally offended her. “What’s in it for me?”

His arm sagged. “Uh, a sense of fulfilment? Happiness, for your sister, whom you love so dearly.”

She clucked her tongue a little too sharply. “Sounds boring.”

_Liar_ , he thought.

Although on the outside Vanish was merely the feisty, loud, reckless counterpart to Tooth’s sweet, compulsive personality, Jack had soon realised after having spent enough time with the younger faerie that a protectiveness of her sister ran terribly deep in Vanish. She had once offhandedly hinted at time when their parents had been taken from them, and she and Tooth had had to fight their way through hell to save each other and their parent’s legacy from dying along with them. She’d been more than a little drunk at the time, and thereafter never mentioned anything more about it. But the slip of that secret had explained so much about Vanish’s character, and Jack had known then and there that the streak of potent protectiveness and bravery that burned hotly behind Vanish’s gaze was a product of once nearly losing everything she loved.

But for some reason Jack still couldn’t comprehend, she went to great lengths to make sure nobody noticed it. And if Jack ever mentioned anything about her courage or her affection for Tooth, she jumped down his throat without even a polite warning.

“I heard you avoided me the other day,” she said, cutting through his thoughts. “That was super rude, by the way.”

_I had also just woken up from a two-week coma. Excuse me for not wanting to deal with your company straight away._

Jack sighed and opted for the part of the truth that wouldn’t result in his early death. “I wanted to get the book for Tooth so she could finally sort out that tower.”

A suspiciously raised eyebrow. “Took you long enough.”

“I got lost.”

Vanish scoffed. “Lost?”

Jack threw his arms out in exasperation. “The Emporium is not the easiest place to find, Vanish. The door moves, the winds were confused. None of us had a good time, okay? Can you just give Tooth the book?”

With a roll of her eyes, Vanish finally extended her hand for the tome, and Jack practically dropped it on her. She let out a little _oof_ and had to maneuverer the heavy volume in her arms to sit it comfortably. “For future reference, the realm the Emporium is in is called Kitrashin.”

Jack blinked. It had a _name_?! For the _love_ of –

He sighed, heavily, and used his free hand to rub his forehead. “Why couldn’t Tooth have told me that?” he muttered meekly.

_Not that we’ll ever be going back again_ , his mind reminded him.

“What’re you mumbling there?” Vanish inquired. Nosily, Jack might’ve added if he hadn’t been eavesdropping on a private argument himself not ten minutes ago.

He removed his hand from his face and peered at Vanish. “You’ve been there before?”

The faerie grinned a little and battered her hand before her face. “Inari and I go way back. We’re best buds.”

Jack assumed this Inari must be the owner of the Emporium – or maybe they were another clerk, like Pitch, or stallholder like those batty gurgling women. Regardless, Jack would hopefully never be going back to the place to ever have to be acquainted with whatever personality Vanish considered worthy enough to befriend.

_They’re probably terrifying_ , he mentally concluded.

“Poor them,” he said with a smile as he backed up to the edge of the platform.

Ignoring his quip, Vanish gave him a disappointed pout. “Leaving?”

“There’s a city somewhere in dire need of a snow day, Vanish. I am being summoned.”

An unfamiliar emotion ghosted over Vanish’s face as she chewed on her lip. Jack didn’t know what to think of it until she said, “You better come back soon, Jack. Just in case you fall into another coma and don’t wake up this time.”

He paused. She had been worried about him?

Crap. How was he supposed to reply to that? The language he and Vanish spoke was one of mischief and sarcasm, and save for the rare drunk moment on Vanish’s behalf, their relationship had never been too… well, serious. But this Vanish was definitely serious, and Jack felt his insides twist a little at how she looked almost… fragile.

So he did the only thing he could. He smiled, charming and kind, and Vanish managed to return it with a little one of her own. “I’ll think about,” he said with a playful wink, and summoning a strong wind, he dropped off the platform and few on out of the palace before he could see Vanish’s shaking fingers tighten around the book he’d left with her.

Unfortunately, Jack got about as far as one of the entrance archways before he was knocked off his wind by a lump of grey fur.

Two oversized paws caught him in a princess hold before Jack could fall to his death, and Jack didn’t know whether to be indignant or relieved that Bunny’s selectively fast reflexes could both humiliate and save him at the same time.

“Crickey! Almost hit ya for a sixer there.”

Jack blinked at him and decided that it would probably be best if he didn’t try decoding Bunny’s jargon at this late stage of their relationship. “You can put me down, man,” Jack told him, wiggling in Bunny’s hold. With a start, Bunny seemed to realise their relatively compromising position, and dropped Jack unceremoniously onto the thin golden arch the Pooka was balanced on.

From his vantage point on his ass, Jack squinted up at Bunny when the dumbass began staring off around them like some solemn warrior.

_Sometimes I think this guy forgets he paints eggs for a living_.

Jack cleared his throat. “Why are you just standing around here?”

Bunny’s serene air cracked and he had the good sense to look a little embarrassed. “I’m waiting for a ride. Can’t tunnel into the ground from all the way up here.” He released a strained chuckle, before a pair of synapses finally decided to fire, and Bunny frowned down at the frost spirit. “Jack, what are you doing here?”

Jack shrugged. “Came to say hi to Vanish.” Simple, neat. Technically not entirely a lie.

_And taken like bait_ , Jack thought as Bunny snorted unattractively. “I’m not even surprised you two are mates.”

Considering not too long ago he was threatening to deck the woman, Jack was pretty sure Bunny wasn’t laying a compliment on him. “What’s that supposed to mean.”

But Bunny was already scanning the horizon again. Jack glanced out and saw the expanse of green-sprinkled mountains that stood in great sweeping chains around and away from the palace. Some were high enough to be partially cloaked by the thin clouds barely above them, whilst others just basked in the warm sunlight raining down on their dry stone faces.

The sight was beautiful – everything about Punjam Hy Loo was – but it wasn’t enough to steal the attention of someone who had probably been here countless times in his fluffy life. Jack’s eyes slid up to Bunny and quietly asked, “You okay?”

Of course Jack  knew that everything was not alright with Bunny – the idiot wouldn’t have come to Tooth’s palace to yell at her if all was peachy – but he couldn’t just leave this guy to stew, could he? Technically Jack hadn’t been let in on all the Guardians’ secrets either, but they were still meant to be a team. Ish. Thing. Weren’t they?

Jack’s forehead pinched as he remembered the last time he’d had a proper conversation with North. He recalled that look in North’s eyes – the darkness that made Jack feel like a complete stranger in his own skin – and swallowed as he reconsidered his motives for prying into Bunny’s wellbeing.

_Maybe venting his anger on me will stop him from coming back around next week and fucking around with Tooth and her schedules even more._

“Sounds more likely than teamwork,” he muttered.

Bunny raised an eyebrow at Jack’s muttering, but if he understood any of it, didn’t comment on Jack’s external thoughts. Instead he offered Jack as warm of a smile as Jack reckoned the Pooka could muster without losing his manhood. “Yeah, mate. She’ll be right. But I’m stoked to see you’re feeling better. Had us all worried.”

_Is Bunny being… sweet?_

“And Sandy checked in on you while you were conked out and said something weird was going on in your noggin, mate. Made no sense to the rest of us, but you should go talk to him.”

_Sweet_ and _thoughtful_. Jack blew out a breath through his nose and tried a thankful smile on Bunny, not quite sure how he should be reacting to this sudden dousing of kindness.

_But I do know for sure, though, that Sandy ain’t seeing me until I’ve rolled through some snow._

“Yeah, sure Bunny. And, uh, thanks. You know, for caring.”

Bunny looked about as awkward as Jack felt in that moment, and Jack decided that it was time he bolted while he could. Before a snow globe fell on his head and suddenly had him careening toward another week of hard labour.

“Good luck getting down,” Jack teased as the winds began blowing around him.

“Rack off,” Bunny called with a grin, holding his ears down as the winds ripped through the palace and dragged Jack off into the mountains

 

“Mummy! Mummy, it’s snowing!”

“It’s too early for snow, darling.”

“Noo! Look outside! _SNOW_.”

“What are you… oh. Oh my.”

Perched on a picket fence, Jack watched as colourful little bundles of scarves and woollen coats danced in the snow he had rained down on their town overnight. The sound of children laughing and shrieking brought a warm glow to a chamber of his ever-cold heart, and so with a smile on his face, Jack twirled his staff and snowflakes were whisked up into the air, taking the occasional hat with them. The children giggled.

_This is where I’m meant to be_ , he thought to himself as he watched some parents quickly hurry out to their children and bundle them up warmly to protect them from the wind. Some complained, others wiggled out of the adults’ grips and ran off to build snowmen with their friends. _Lots of snow, lots of fun_.

“And lots of time to kill,” he mumbled to himself. It had been a few weeks since he’d dumped the lexicon on Vanish, and his time spent doing what he did best had worked wonders for hemming his frayed nerves. He felt like a little of piece of himself had returned to a semblance of stability.

The rest of him, though, was beginning to get twitchy.

He glanced up at the morning sky, the sun casting heatless light onto the snowy streets. He had drawn the snow a little too early for this particular town, and although Boreas, the supreme dickhead king of winter, hadn’t yet arrived with his cavalry to lock Jack up for upsetting the balance of nature, Jack could feel through the cold that Boreas was not the least bit happy with him. Which was nothing new, if Jack was to be honest. But there was hostility in this snow – a razor edge to the wind that not even Jack’s own fun could soften.

Jack knew the point at which the children began to feel the unfriendliness too. They were perceptive, these kids. A couple began looking over a friend who was shivering despite the multitude of layers she had been rugged up in, and another boy, a little older than the rest, tightened the scarf around her head and said, “Let’s go inside until the sun warms up a little more.”

Jack _tsk_ ed and jumped off his fence. He eased up on the cold winds as others seemed to follow the boy’s advice and head inside for the sake of their noses. Soon enough, the streets were empty save for the few cars which ploughed through the fresh snow, and Jack felt an itching bitterness prickle in his gut.

“You’re a serious killjoy, Boreas,” he muttered to the winds.

He was rewarded with an icy snap that was cold enough to send pain lancing through Jack’s toes, and the frost spirit yelped.

“Fucking asshole,” Jack grumbled as he turned and headed for the forest just on the outskirts of the little town. If he couldn’t bring fun to the children, then he’d sulk in the trees for a while until winter properly set in and Boreas would deign to let him sprinkle a little snow around the place without crawling up Jack’s ass.

But as he was approaching the snow-dusted trees, leaves still orange and red for the autumn season, the sight of a swarming green mass had Jack pausing on the sidewalk. He frowned, squinting to get a better look at whatever seemed to be coming toward him from the trees. It wasn’t until the small cloud of bodies had emerged from the thicket that Jack realised who they were.

And what they were carrying.

He groaned. “Oh no. No, no, please _no_ –”

 

“So much for never coming back here again,” Jack deadpanned to the black-purple doorway which had, surely just to spite the frost spirit, dropped anchor in the middle of a goddamn desert on a hot afternoon.

When the Baby Teeth had appeared at that tree line, carrying the lexicon on a sheet of cloth to spread the weight between them all, Jack had felt like leaping into a pile of hate-encrusted snow and hiding until they left. But the apologetic twittering of the faeries had punched right through Jack’s asshole inclinations, and _damnit_ they were just so sweet.

At least this time he’d had Vanish’s tip to work on, and the winds (still a bit nippy from Boreas’s wrath, but becoming increasingly kinder with Jack’s influence) seemed to know exactly where to head when Jack told them the name of the realm. Simply uttering “Kitrashin” cut his flying time from one week down to a single day, and he was still mentally berating Tooth for not thinking to offer it to him beforehand.

_But she has a lot on her plate. The little things probably easily slip her mind when she’s got so many memories to look after._

A white figure bobbed at his side, drawing Jack from his thoughts, and he raised an uncomfortably warm eyebrow down at the little ghost spirit. “You came for round two as well?” The spirit twirled, either in response or just because it could.

He cracked the door open before the slab of wood could think of disappearing on them (and before Jack could melt in this heat), and gestured for the little spirit to go in ahead of him. “You gonna come with me this time?”

The spirit lurched forward at the idea, but when it was close enough to the floating threshold to leap at it, its knees (if those twigs it used as legs even had knees) hit the wooden frame and it fell backwards. Jack noticed then that the doorway was hoisted a few feet higher than the last time they had encountered it. Out on the dry, dusty plains somewhere where the sun had bleached the trees a ghostly white, the doorway had managed to find a stack of chipped, dry rocks and wedge itself into the side of it, elevating the threshold without thinking to leaving a rock or two to act as a step for anything too short to jump to its ledge.

Jack made a distressed noise on the spirit’s behalf, and went to give the thing a hand. But as soon as Jack stepped toward it, the spirit scrambled off the ground and hid behind the open door.

His heart pinched a little. The spirit was often so close to Jack that he had never really considered that it might wary of him. Like a skittish animal content with being in close proximity if it was on its own terms, but constantly prone to bolting as soon as anything advanced on it.

_Reminds me of someone,_ his brain sneered at him.

Jack swallowed and kneeled in the dusty soil. “You mustn’t have liked being manhandled by Bunny and Sandy then, huh?”

As usual, there was no reply. But the spirit did seem to be intrigued by Jack’s new position, and came out from behind the doorway to curiously inspect him. Jack stiffened a bit when it got a little too close – after all, this was arguably the nearest they had been to one another – and stood, cautiously so as not to spook it, after a few moments.

“Sorry about them,” he told the spirit, feeling the need to apologise for his companions’ rough behaviour even if the spirit probably wouldn’t care for the sentiment.

Jack chewed on the inside of his cheek as he thought. Remembering the way the spirit had been tiptoeing across North’s bookshelves, swords on back, Jack looked down at his staff, and then at the spirit. “You like balancing on things, right?”

The spirit just stared at him, and Jack hooked the end of his staff into the doorframe, jamming the straight end into the dirt at their feet. The spirit, despite its usually blank stare, seemed to know exactly what Jack was trying to do, and before Jack had even straightened up it was scrambling up the staff and into Kitrashin.

Jack snorted and unhooked his staff-turned-ramp and hoisted himself through the doorway just as it was beginning to waver.

But as the door was squeaking closed behind them, an uneasy sensation settled like sediment in his stomach.

_It’s_ _nerves_ , he told himself. _After all, Pitch is probably on duty and he was an asshole last time I was here._

On the other side of the door, out of earshot of the frost spirit, crows began to caw in the canopies of the porcelain trees, as if they were trying to tell Jack how very, very wrong he was.

 

The Emporium was just as Jack had last left it – minus the two cloaked gurgling women, he soon amended – and now that he wasn’t so overcome with the culture shock of stepping into something so lavish after having braved that decrepit alleyway, Jack was sound enough of mind to be unfazed by the brilliance of the shop.

The same could not have been said of the little spirit, though.

It blew into the shop like a storm, unannounced and with zero regard for anything except the shiny surfaces it was unerringly drawn to. Jack cringed and hoped that this unwarranted visit to the Emporium wouldn’t result in Jack having to work alongside Pitch to pay for all the valuables broken by the little spirit.

As the spirit bounded around the shop shamelessly, Jack paused at the kitsune statue in the centre of the room, surrounded by its tall spiralling pillars of wood. The polished statue was waving an oriental fan, and now that Jack was up close to it, he could see that it actually moved, minutely, fluttering the fan down toward Jack as the statue peered at him. Jack stepped up to the stone kitsune, adorned with rings and chains of gold in its ears and around its neck, and wreathed with deep coloured living blossoms. The statue blinked, long eyelashes hitting stone-carved fur, before those eyes continued their dead stare down at Jack.

“Is this the owner of the shop?” he asked, not really sure if he was addressing himself, or hoping, absently, that someone was around to answer him.

“Better question,” came the curt reply a moment later. Jack jumped and his eyes flew to the front counter where Pitch, semi-reclined in his chair, was glaring at him while the little spirit stood proudly on his thighs. Jack felt his lips curl into a smile at the sight, and Pitch’s glare darkened. “Is this yours?” he ground out.

A bubble of laugher escaped Jack’s throat. He couldn’t help it – Pitch just looked so utterly ridiculous. The spirit had probably spied his long legs and used them as a ramp to climb to better and greater places of sightseeing, and was now standing proudly in the lap of the Nightmare King as it twitchily looked around the shop. Any inclination that the spirit might have been a product of Pitch’s evil undertakings was erased by the look of sheer disgust on his face – and if that hadn’t done it, then surely the image of the wonky grinning spirit was ruinous to Pitch’s dark aesthetic.

The more Pitch glared, the more Jack tried to stifle his laughter. It was difficult, but eventually he managed to tame it enough to be able to answer Pitch. “It hangs around me, I guess. That doesn’t mean I own it, though.”

Pitch turned from Jack to stare at the spirit in distaste. Jack moved forward a little, concerned that Pitch might try one of those horrifying stares and scare the wits out of his weird little companion. Pitch’s gold and silver eyes flickered to him briefly, and Jack knew by the dry smile on his face that scaring the little spirit was exactly what Pitch was trying to do.

But after a silent minute of staring, Pitch huffed in annoyance. “Get it off me,” he demanded.

Jack raised an eyebrow. _His fear-stare didn’t work?_ “What? No more fun now that you can’t play by your own rules?”

Pitch looked less than impressed, and Jack had to wonder – he _had_ to – if Pitch actually had any other facial expressions in his repertoire besides the varying shades of annoyance or evil Jack had always been exposed to. Like intrigued. Or, god forbid, happy.

_Bearing in mind that whatever would put a smile on Pitch’s face is probably unhealthy for the greater good of the world._

Jack couldn’t argue with that thought.

Pitch smacked a palm on the stone countertop to get Jack’s attention, and pointed at the grinning spirit in his lap. His scowl was cutting so deep Jack wondered if his skull would be left with an imprint of it. “Get over here, Frost, and remove your creature from my vicinity.”

Jack bristled at the command. “Do it yourself oh great and fearful king,” he snipped, heading over toward the empty book cases.

A sigh. “Let me rephrase. Remove your creature _before I break its legs_.”

Jack stopped at the sound of the threat, and gave Pitch a look. “Why are you so crabby?”

The Nightmare King twitched and looked at Jack as if he could just strangle him. “Why do you think?”

“It’s just having a little fun,” Jack mumbled as he stepped toward the counter and placed his staff on the stone top. The spirit took one last long stare at Pitch’s face before it hopped off his lap (jamming a foot into Pitch’s stomach and winding him in the process, to the deep delight of Jack), walked across Jack’s staff and jumped off, performing a little flip whilst it was in the air.

Rubbing his abdomen, Pitch muttered under his breath something about his idea of fun, and Jack had to snort, just a little, and the sight of Pitch being so bitter. The spirit skipped over to the kitsune statue and began admiring the moving features of the stonework.

Jack wandered back over to the books, and instantly the shelves were filled will volumes upon volumes of the fae lexicons. “You never answered my question.”

Pitch got out of his chair and dusted his shirt and pants off in such a refined manner it nearly hid how irritated he was. Nearly. But Jack watched him, probably a little closer than he should have, and noticed the jerky edge to the movements, the way his fingers twitched as if he was restraining himself, how his hand went for his hair before stopping, abruptly, and falling to the chair behind him.

Jack’s lip twitched. _You’re looking a little human there, Pitch. Maybe I wasn’t so far off after all._

Pitch swung his long coat over his shoulders and said, “Yes that is Inari, the owner of the Emporium.”

The “mistress” he had mentioned last week who adored the Punjam Hy Loo. “Vanish said they were friendly, but then why would your boss be interested in a tile from the palace if she knew Vanish and Tooth? Surely she could have just asked them for one ages ago.”

Pitch scoffed, almost amused. Almost. “If you ever have the displeasure of meeting Inari, mention that Sister of Flight’s name to her and she’ll tell you just how friendly they really are.”

_Looks like my Vanish Sarcasm Detector needs to be recalibrated._

“Now get out.”

Jack startled and whirled on the tall, dark, _rude_ man. “What? Why?”

Pitch slid his arms into his coat sleeves and adjusted the collar so it stood tall against his neck. It was odd seeing him slip into actual clothes, but the coat sat well on his shoulders, the arms long enough that they nearly reached his slender thumbs. Jack had to bite back a stab of frustration at how put together Pitch always looked.

As he breezed past Jack, Pitch said, “We’re closing early today.”

Jack’s eye twitched. “That’s not very professional of you.”

“It’s for professional reasons,” Pitch replied without missing a beat.

_Of all the days…_ Jack waved the book at Pitch when the man finally turned back to see what was taking Jack so long to follow his orders. “Can I at least exchange this real quick?”

Pitch’s eyes narrowed. “No.”

“Come _on_ , Pitch. I’ll literally be a second. Just tell me what the letters for fifty-eight are.”

Pitch stared him down for a moment, as he usually did, Jack assumed, when he was torn between being civil and giving Jack his way (as his job demanded of him) and throwing civility to the wind and just murdering the frost spirit. “LVIII. Hurry up.”

Shooting the asshole a flash of a grin, Jack made quick work of rummaging through the rest of the books, this time making sure to shift piles out of his way so he wouldn’t feel trapped in amongst them. He found the volume Tooth wanted, and made a grand show of putting the other back on the shelf so Pitch could see that he wasn’t trying to screw him over. Pitch just rolled his eyes by the doorway.

“We don’t have all night.”

Jack hooked his staff around the body of the little spirit as it came dashing past him, and gently changed its direction so it headed for the stairwell. He felt like a parent trying to herd their overactive child around a mall. “Why? Got a hot date?”

“With your dismembered corpse,” Pitch muttered between his teeth. The words were spoken lowly, almost too quietly for Jack to hear them.

Oh, but he had heard them.

And he nearly dropped his staff in shock.

Jack gasped dramatically and brought the book to his mouth in a scandalised gesture. “Was that a _necrophilia_ joke? Seriously, Pitch?”

The mentioned man chose that exact moment to turn on his heel and stomp up the stairs with a huff, which _totally_ gave the bastard away.

Jack couldn’t help but feel a touch of smugness at the knowledge that the Nightmare King did, indeed, have an iota of a sense of humour.

And it was as dark as his personality.

_Skreek would love you_ , Jack thought with a little grin as he followed Pitch and the spirit through Kitrashin’s hovel of an alleyway.

When they reached the lone doorway, Pitch was surprisingly enough of a gentleman to hold the door open for both Jack and the spirit to step out into a dusky beach scene. Jack eyed him as he brushed past the man, half expecting Pitch to slam the door behind Jack and wait until the doorway teleported to the other side of the world before he left himself. But Pitch did nothing of the kind – he simply stepped out behind Jack and let the door squeal closed.

And furthermore, he seemed to be appraising the book Jack had exchanged the last one for.

“Tooth said the other one helped,” Jack said, feeling like he should point out that Pitch’s recommendation hadn’t been snubbed because of its quality. “But it was just a guide, so she needed the volume dedicated to the whole language.”

Pitch looked at him with a hint of surprise. Then frowned. “I am not offended, if that is what you’re worried about.”

He wasn’t worried about it. But he just felt… rude, almost. As if he was shoving Pitch’s help in his face. Help Pitch had offered…. as a part of his job. Because he’d had to.

_You were expecting anything different?_

“Clearly not,” Jack murmured, feeling a stupid flake of disappointment dig right into his ribcage.

A crow’s caw, loud and piercing, broke through whatever little convoluted thought sesh Jack was having with himself, and a shiver raced down Jack’s spine. He looked up, took note that Pitch was in the process of locking the Emporium’s door with some sort of instrument, before his eyes were drawn out toward the dark waters lapping at the sand. Clouds obstructed the Moon’s view of the earth, and also whatever view he might have copped of Pitch and Jack and a creepy little spirit standing around on a beach together at dusk.

_What would you think if you saw that?_ Jack asked the skies silently. _I bet you wouldn’t even care._

A silver light caught his eye on the water’s surface, and suddenly Jack’s resentment dried up into cold panic. His heart, for weeks now having been comfortably chilling in his chest without disturbance, clawed up into the back of his throat.

“Frost?”

Jack’s eyes skittered sideways to Pitch, who had abandoned the complicated venture he was undertaking to stare incredulously down at the frost spirit.

Could he feel Jack’s panic already? The frost spirit swallowed and hoarsed, “What day is it today?”

For whatever merciful reason, Pitch didn’t dick around with his answer. “The first night of Halloween,” he said slowly, as if asking a question himself, before swiftly finishing up the locking process.

Jack’s gaze panned back over the waters, and he had to tell himself to breathe when he saw that more silver lights had appeared, hovering, wavering. They wouldn’t be any more than lights until the Halloween King pulled back the Veil, but they were still too close for Jack’s liking. “Is that why you had to close the shop?” he asked absently.

Pitch made an affirmative noise. “The spirits interfere with the realm, and Inari cannot create any effective wards to hold them back.”

Jack’s breathing began to quicken. Of course Inari couldn’t have kept the spirits out with any old wards, only the Halloween King himself had enough authority and power to keep the dead out of any one area. So far, Jack only knew of two places the King had so deigned to offer such protection to – his own house, and North’s Workshop, for the sake of pre-Christmas productivity.

_We need to leave._

_We need to go._

A flash of white dashed to his side, and Jack recoiled with an alarmed cry. His back slammed into a hard arm, and Pitch had to grab hold of Jack to stop him from toppling them both. Pitch’s hand on the side of Jack’s shoulder was warm, too warm in this muggy beachside heat, and thankfully didn’t linger long.

“What are you so afraid of?”

Jack choked on Pitch’s voice, the Nightmare King’s velvety timbre mocking him of all things when he was very clearly distressed.

Fuck’s sake. He really couldn’t expect much else of this guy, could he?

_He is the Nightmare King, after all_ , his mind whispered.

The little spirit, the flash of white that had scared him so, tilted its head.

Forgetting Pitch and his twisted personality for the moment, Jack realised with a sinking sense of dread that he wouldn’t be able to hide out at North’s this Halloween. The spirit would find its way in and Jack refused to be responsible for North’s swords successfully being stolen. He couldn’t do that to North. Not to mention the Workshop was probably in chaos with all the extra preparation they had to do for Christmas this year.

A silver light washed up onto the shore, and Jack knew that he only had one other option. He turned to face the man still standing behind him. The door had disappeared.

Jack dug his toes into cool sand and met Pitch’s glowing eyes. Crap, why did he have to be so intimidating? “When we were in your evil lair of darkness, you used to use your shadows to transport around the place. Can you still do that?”

_This isn’t a good idea._

Pitch raised a suspicious, albeit invisible, eyebrow, and Jack thought he could pick up a hint of dubious curiosity in his stare. “To a point. Why?”

_This is Pitch Black! Asking him for anything is a bad fucking idea!_

Ignoring his vehement thoughts, Jack sucked in a breath. “Would you take me somewhere?” he blurted. “As a favour, I’ll pay you back I swear.” And he wouldn’t even regret it. He was scared, his heart was having a crisis somewhere near his tonsils and Jack needed to get off this beach and somewhere safe. He’d do nearly anything. Especially if it meant saving himself from being haunted by –

“No.”

Jack flinched at the blunt answer. _Not even a thoughtful pause_ , he thought as his eyes left Pitch’s with a resigned nod. He didn’t have time to argue with the man. Taking careful steps away from the silver lights appearing from the waters, Jack looked around and called a breath of wind to him, dragging the scents and flavours of the green growth beyond this little nook of sand to his person.

_We’re in Australia_ , he realised when the scent of eucalyptus hit him hard.

Alright. He could do this. He just had to follow the sun for the next two days and stay as high above ground as he could possibly stand –

_That didn’t work the first time you tried it_ , his mind reminded him.

Jack shuddered at the memory of torn and bloodied faces leaping out at him from the clouds and reconsidered his plan with a curse. As soon as the King started pulling back the Veil, there was nowhere to hide, was there? The dead seemed to follow the twilight, but sometimes they were tenacious in their pursuits of the living.

The ones that searched Jack out especially were.

Oh god. What was he supposed to do? Throw the little spirit into a box somewhere and make a run for North’s?

But he couldn’t. That was just too cruel. And since the Halloween King’s house was in an entirely different realm, Jack couldn’t simply waft on in there on Winter’s winds.

For once in his life, Jack wished he had a snow globe on him.

A low sigh came from his right. “I can practically hear your mind turning over. Where do you need to go so urgently?”

Jack jumped a little at Pitch’s question and turned wide eyes onto the weary-looking man. “The Halloween King’s place,” Jack said warily.

_Are we seriously doing this?_

“Why?” Pitch asked, his forehead creased a little. He looked guarded but also a little conflicted, as if he couldn’t believe this was being asked of him, and, even worse, he couldn’t believe that he was just maybe giving in.

Jack licked his dry lips and, involuntarily, his eyes flickered to the approaching silver lights and back again. “Does it matter why?”

Pitch glanced out at the sea and must have noticed the incoming glowing entities for the first time because the hint of wary apprehension lifted from his face. Some sort of realisation skittered across his features, and although Jack’s pride had been beaten down a few times by this man, at the moment he didn’t care if Pitch was internally laughing at him for being afraid of a few balls of light.

“Will you take me?”

A muscle in Pitch’s throat tightened, and his eyes slid back to Jack with an unfathomable expression in them. Jack just held his stare, too afraid to look away in case his only saviour disappeared just like the doorway, and too terrified in case those silver lights were close enough to brush against Jack’s skin.

“Please,” he begged.

By some miracle, something seemed to snap inside Pitch, and the man closed his eyes as if pained. “Come here,” he said lowly, removing his hands from where they’d been sitting in the pockets of his coat.

A relieved breath gushed out of Jack, and he stumbled forward mindlessly. When he was close enough to see that shadows had begun to swarm around their king, Pitch’s eyes snapped open. The grey had almost entirely engulfed the gold and Jack felt a pinch in his chest at the sight of those near-colourless irises.

_I’ve seen you like this before_ , he internally whispered to himself.

Pitch held out both of his hands, and Jack let him slide his long, warm fingers under Jack’s sleeves and onto his wrists, one extended and holding his staff, the other by his leg and gripping the book. The contact of skin on skin shocked a flinch out of Jack, and he mumbled an apology for being so skittish. Pitch’s grip tightened.

“That thing is not coming with us,” he stated.

Jack looked up at Pitch, at the tiny ring of gold barely holding on in a sea of grey, at the ashen skin surrounding a mouth pressed into a firm, unyielding line. The frost spirit cast a pair of apologetic blue eyes over his shoulder and uttered a second apology to the spirit nearly standing on his heels.

And then shadows were billowing around them, curling around Jack’s limbs, around his staff and his book, cascading through his hair almost like smoke but worse.

He hated the feeling of darkness.

But he hated the stares of the dead even more.

And so Jack squeezed his eyes shut before he could be forcibly blinded by the darkness and tried to hold down the shivers that tempted to peel the skin from his body.

_Breathe_.

“Breathe,” Pitch ordered.

Jack flinched, nodded without opening his eyes, and did as he was told as he felt the world tilt beneath his feet.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for all your beautiful kudos and comments <3
> 
> I had also very much wanted to get this chapter out before Halloween (so it was topical and that shiz) but, well, look where we are. So just know the thought was there. And that Halloween reigns on forever in all of our hearts.


	6. On This Night of... (Part I)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Jack catches up with some old faces, and Jack's old faces get introduced to a dark and scowling new face.

The fields of the Halloween King were as expansive as they were dead – which was very, on both counts. Although on his good days Yves Saint Hallow considered himself an excellent farmer, all he had to show for it were fields upon fields of dead grass scattered with pumpkins appropriated by tiny little monsters that did nothing but create the unholiest of noises during the night.

Yves’s house wasn’t in much better shape. A testimony to the owner’s flippant attitude toward structural dignity, the multi-story home was a mismatched construction of aged brick, warped wooden boards, chipped stone, and the limbs of an oversized pumpkin plant that had long ago become inseparable from the bones of the house. Considering the size of the plant, and the condition of the house, the ingrown pumpkin invader probably helped keep the frame leaning more or less at a structurally satisfactory angle when the wind was not at full strength, although it didn’t help fix the fact that the exterior constantly appeared as if the house would crack into pieces at any given moment.

However, when the wind _did_ think to tear through the King’s realm without mercy, not even the pumpkin plant could stop the house from creaking and shuddering. Tiles fell off the roof and splinters flew off the porch banisters and went for the eyes of all the unfortunate souls lingering nearby. It was as if the house itself was trying to take out its bitterness over its own rotting age on everyone it could spy with its dusty, cracked eyes.

In Jack’s honest opinion, the one redeeming feature of the King’s realm was its sky. He had been told that during the majority of the year, it usually swirled a curious shade of aquamarine or teal, bright and inviting and never obscured by a single cloud. But Jack had only ever seen it on Halloween, when the sky turned dark and churned the deepest and lightest hues of purple and an acidic orange. The colours moved, never motionless as they swirled and curled above Yves’s house as if brewing a storm. It spread a dusky, dark amethyst light throughout the whole of the realm, a shifting twilight that never completely devoured all the light, but left enough for one’s mind to conjure monsters out of innocent shapes, a trick of the mind and treat for all those game enough to relish in the sensory manipulation.

This “spooky kind of fun”, as Yves would put it, was one of the things Jack liked most about the Halloween King. Not to mention that the sky he’d created when he made his realm was so different from the sprawling blue Jack was used to that the frost spirit was forever mesmerised by the sheer audacity of it.

Except, of course, when the mysterious sky of Yves’s lands was being blacked out by a cawing mob of giant-ass crows.

The sound and sight of these monstrous birds hit Jack simultaneously, and as soon as his eyes were open and he realised his prone position lying flat on his back on the footpath, Jack threw his hands up to cover his face and yelled, “GODDAMNIT!”

Every time he was whisked into Yves’s realm, _every damn time_ , he always ended up surrounded by the Halloween King’s equivalent of a pack of guard dogs. Presumably realising that their prey was not as dead as they had originally believed, the birds all started cawing at one another, then came back at Jack with sharpened beaks.

Jack was on his feet in an instant and squaring up to the eight-foot birds. “Shoo! Get the hell away from me you oversized freaks!”

Although Jack may be considered rude for insulting the Halloween King’s birds in his own home, he had never been friendly with the enormous monsters that always congregated on Yves’s front lawn. They always tried to steal his staff when he wasn’t looking, were constantly eyeing him off in hopes that he might keel over and provide a crisp snack for them, and generally drove him insane with their constant cawing.

“Hey!” Jack yelled when he saw a mass of dark feathers waddling toward Tooth’s book, where it lay half-open on the grass. He scrambled towards the giant creature and tried to shoo the bird off. But huge black eyes just stared straight down at him in indignation, and eventually Jack huffed a curse and elbowed the animal out of the way to get to the book.

A low chuckle sounded just beyond the milling crows – there were nine of them at least, and for goodness sake why did Yves have to make them so _big_ – and Jack looked between black feathers and saw Pitch standing well out of the firing line of the giant birds. He looked amused, this time properly amused, with an evil glint in his eyes and his lip quirked ever so slightly.

Jack swallowed around an odd feeling in his throat – he couldn’t decide if it was a victorious pang for managing to get Pitch to look anything but pained, or if it was bitter annoyance at being laughed at. But a moment later it didn’t matter anymore, because Jack’s eyes fell to the hands Pitch had tightened around his wrists not too long ago, and the emotions he had been trying to untangle collapsed into a cold ball of dread.

_Why does he have our staff?_

A brief and painful flashback to Antarctica ten years ago stabbed through Jack’s chest, reminding him of the agony he had experienced the last time Pitch had had his hands on Jack’s staff. But then Jack shook his head and forced down the dread. Pitch hadn’t wanted it before, right? When Jack was out of his mind and the staff was on the Emporium’s floor, there for the taking, Pitch hadn’t so much as glanced at it.

Had he changed his mind?

….Well, if he had, Jack had promised Pitch a favour, hadn’t he? For saving his sanity and delivering him from the silver lights, he’d promised him anything.

_Our staff isn’t just anything._

“I know that,” Jack muttered as he pushed through the swarming crows.

Curiously, Pitch worked to wipe any expression off his face the closer Jack got to him, until the frost spirit was standing within arm’s reach of the Nightmare King and the latter had resumed his usual unreadable mask. It might have been a trick of the dim light, but Jack could have sworn that Pitch looked a little paler than he had earlier – which was saying something, considering the grey hue of his skin tone.

Jack’s eyes flickered to his staff, his heart clenching at the thought of having to offer it up for slaughter for a second time in his life.

_Offer him something else. Anything else._

Jack opened his mouth to object to Pitch taking the staff, to throw a verbal distraction at the guy so Jack could snatch the staff and run, to say… to say anything, even if it was just to warn Pitch to keep it safe and in one piece if this was what he wanted.

But then Pitch did something that had Jack reeling.

_Pitch_ offered _Jack_ the staff, and the frost spirit’s eyes flew to Pitch’s face, wide and surprised.

_Is this a trick?_

An invisible eyebrow hiked high, and Jack thought Pitch might have looked a little offended. “I don’t need your staff, Frost. I have no use for a stick that can only channel the cold.”

His bones could have melted into jelly, Jack was so grateful. He took his staff back, felt cold spark through it as soon as his fingers touched it, and barely resisted rubbing his face over the twisted wood out of pure relief.

Only when his mind was settled again did he realise what was wrong with the current picture. “Hey, how come you’re all the way over here? We came together didn’t we?”

_Holding hands, no less._

Jack flushed a little.

“You lost consciousness when we crossed through the realm’s barrier,” Pitch told him with a smirk that seemed to even reach his eyes, as if Jack flaking out was the very entertaining highlight of his working week.

Jack scowled for a moment at Pitch’s face, then up at the sky. Nothing like that had ever happened to him when he’d previously been teleported in. Had Yves upped the security in the realm since Jack had last been here? Or was Jack now just prone to passing out at the drop of a hat?

The frost spirit returned the scowl to Pitch. “How come _you’re_ still standing then?”

The Nightmare King bared his teeth. “Will power.”             

_That explains why you look so pale_. “And then what, you just dumped my unconscious body on the ground?”

“Would you rather have had me nurse you on my knee until you came to?”

On second thought, Jack didn’t think he would have been able to deal with waking up to Nurse Pitch. The thought alone was nearly too much for his poor brain to compartmentalize. He looked over his shoulder at the crows still clumped together and pecking too-large holes in Yves’s unfortunate lawn. They were literally the size of miniature craters. If Yves was one for front-yard bake sales (and Jack would bet his left foot that Yves would take up a career in community baking if he wasn’t so introverted), he’d have to put signs up in case any unsuspecting customer fell into one of the many ditches and was lost forever.

“That goes beyond aerating the soil,” he said, half to himself, and half to those monsters.

An odd scoffing sound came from behind Jack, and the frost spirit looked back at Pitch out of concern and surprise. Did he just chuckle? And not just _at_ Jack, but at _a_ _joke Jack made_?

But of course Pitch was as composed as a bonsai as soon as Jack’s eyes found him, and Jack felt a little dismayed. “Thanks to you they probably thought I was dead and were planning on picking my bones clean.”

“And now they have to peck the soil for dinner,” Pitch replied serenely, the ring of gold around his pupils nearly glowing in the dim darkness. “A true tragedy.”

Jack’s lip quirked despite the sinking feeling that Pitch wasn’t entirely joking whenever he quipped lines exalting Jack’s demise. If only because this kind of talk… it was different. It wasn’t Pitch trying to manipulate or insult him, it wasn’t Jack telling him how much of a scumbag he was. Jack wouldn’t exactly call it friendly, either, but it was a kind of different that made him want to –

_Want to what?_ his mind snarled. _Do you even remember who he is? What he_ did _?_

A ball of breath caught in his throat, and Jack’s fists clenched on their items in frustration.

Despite Pitch’s personality, despite his bad intentions, why did Jack have to treat him like shit just because they stood on either sides of a battlefield once? Jack had more allies than he could count who’d as easily turn on him than stand at his side, and yet he still drank with them. Laughed with them. Had fun with them.

So why couldn’t he do that with Pitch?

_He is the antithesis of fun._

“Fear and fun go well together sometimes,” he retorted under his breath.

Pitch frowned at him. “What did you say?”

Jack jolted, and the air in his throat escaped. He was reminded of Pitch’s low voice ordering him to breathe just before they’d left that Australian beach. His voice curling around Jack along with his shadows.

When he’d _helped_ Jack.

_Only because you’d begged like a good boy and showed him how pathetic you are._

A shifting sense of revulsion coiled in the pit of Jack’s gut. It stretched out and strangled any and all amicable emotions Jack might have been harbouring and dragged their bodies into tar-thick sludge. Jack felt his expression pinch in discomfort, and he turned his head to the side in case Pitch was still paying attention to him.

Behind him, the door of Yves’s house complained loudly as it was thrown open.

Somewhat thankful for the fortunate timing, Jack turned and saw that the stupid crows had parted for the sake of their master, who was now standing on the porch of his home in all of his Halloween glory. On his chosen night of the year, Yves Saint Hallow transformed into the King, a godly entity of billowing robes lined with skulls of fallen warriors (or so he claimed) and glowing orange eyes that tapered back halfway into his orange and black hair. The same shade of light poured like smoke from a mouth, that, when opened despite the frayed stitching meant to keep it shut, tore almost as large as that of Jack’s little spirit, transforming his entire face into something that was as captivating as it was horrifying.

“My my my.” The King’s voice, so raw it could grate down bone, sent a shiver through Jack as it scattered across his realm like the light from lightning on a jet black night. His cape, blood orange on the underside and a dusty black on the top, flowed behind him as he walked, the odd spider web curling elegantly at the corners. His unnaturally long legs ate up the stone footpath between the house and where Jack and Pitch stood. “There is a ghostly little face my eyes have not seen in too long.”

Despite his queasiness, Jack felt a smile play around his lips as the King finally reached him. It had been a decade since he’d last seen this freak of nature, and watching him pull back the Veil from the windows of North’s Workshop wasn’t the same as having the being himself stare down at Jack with that terrifying face that made his skin crawl as much as it spread the warm feeling of safety through his insides. In his Halloween form, the King stood over eight feet tall, so Jack – and Pitch, he noticed with a smirk – had to crane their heads back to be able to catch the King’s glowing gaze.

“Your crows tried to eat me again,” Jack told the King by way of greeting.

The King began to cackle in response, a resonating sound that shook everything nearby straight to its core. It also sent a wash of fear straight through Jack’s veins, flushing out the tumultuous pit of revulsion and replacing it with a familiar kind of fear. One that hyped Jack up more than it beat him down. Jack watched the King laugh himself silly at what he thought was Jack trying to be funny (why did he never believe that his crows were made of pure evil?). The stitches across his mouth stretched and warm flickering light poured from his throat. It was chaotic, and Jack missed it so much.

Why had he stopped coming here?

_Because you’d wanted to change_ , his mind reminded him.

“Yeah and look at where that got me,” he uttered in reply.

The King’s laughter ebbed into a low hooting and he stated, “That is because they missed you, bony little Jack Frost.”

“Yeah, whatever,” Jack said with a roll of his eyes.

The King’s torn glowing sockets settled over Jack’s head and onto Pitch. There was a moment when the two males – the two _kings_ , Jack realised with a small gasp – sized one another up in a silence so dignified and ego-filled Jack thought he might choke.

_If they whip out a pair of swords and fight over who has the most honour, I’m done._

The King’s smile stretched without his mouth opening. “Pitch Black.”

Jack watched as Pitch inclined his head, a gesture of grudging respect, probably because he was currently standing on his opponent’s front lawn. “King.”

A sharp, short laugh burst from the King’s throat. “Ah, but you are a king too, are you not, Pitch Black?”

Out of the corner of his eye, Jack saw Pitch flinch. The King seemed to notice it too, because the light from his eyes grew brighter, until it almost stung to look at. But then the King promptly lost interest in their stand off and turned with a swish of his cape to begin beckoning his crows to come forth to their master. “There are spare chairs in the attic,” he called back to Jack.

Jack glanced sideways at Pitch, but by the way Pitch was glowering at the back of the King’s head, he hadn’t noticed that the comment was meant as an invitation for him.

Or maybe he had, and Pitch was just wretchedly disgusted with the idea of spending the night with Jack and the other (probably drunk) guests yelling and laughing inside the run-down farmhouse.

_It’s the latter option_ , his mind told him firmly.

Jack chose to ignore rather than agree with the thought.

_But speaking of drunks yelling…_

“Hey, King,” Jack called. The mentioned collection of limbs swivelled his head on his shoulders like an owl – and goodness didn’t that just give Jack the creeps – and inclined his chin to let Jack know he was listening. “Is Phoenix here?”

The King’s body turned so it would align with his head, and he stroked long bony fingers through the feathers of the crow cuddling up to him. “Not yet.”

Jack went still. “It’s getting late, though.” _I barely made it in time, what the hell is that idiot thinking staying out this long?_

“Do not worry your heart, little Jack Frost. I will blast him back here before I begin my flight.”

The way the King worded his extraction plan sounded super painful, and Jack hoped from the bottom of his icy heart that it would be. “Thanks.”

“Now get inside. Everyone is already drunk, so they will be happy to see their favourite spirit of cold.”

_Knew it_ , Jack thought as he chuckled at the well-worded insult. The King mounted one of his crows like one would a steed and arranged his skulls so they wouldn’t knock into each other during his journey. The rest of the murder – because that’s what the bunch of cawing savages were, really – began to beat wings that spanned so wide they could black out the sun on a clear day. They all rose to the sky in a huge, dark flurry.

In an explosion of feathers and some very maniacal cackling, the Halloween King and his company disappeared.

_Bunch of show-offs._

Jack turned back to Pitch and noticed that he was frowning, almost to himself. There was also a rigidness about his expression that made Jack think he was unhappy. But then, when was he ever _not_ unhappy?

_Guess our little sarcastic bonding moment is over now, huh?_

“You’re welcome to stay,” Jack said, making the King’s previous comment crystal clear.

Pitch jolted a little, and flickered a dubious look between Jack and the warm light beaming from the open doorway in the distance. He seemed to be weighing something up, but as each moment passed and more voices travelled out into the dusky eve in forms of laughter and signing and general cursing, Jack watched as Pitch’s expression grew increasingly disagreeable.

_Just say no already, we all know you’re thinking it._

Then the expression levelled out into completely blankness.

“I think I will.”

_Yeah, I figured you’d – wait what?!_

“ _Seriously_?” Jack breathed in shock as Pitch casually strolled past him and toward the house.

“Was the invitation rhetorical?” Pitch asked, throwing a challenging look back at Jack.

“No! No it wasn’t.” _I just didn’t think you’d actually agree._

“Then shall we?”

Something began to bubble in Jack’s chest as he quickly followed after Pitch, throwing an obligatory dark look out to the tiny sets of eyes he could see glowing at them in the distance. On Yves’s creaking porch, Pitch stood with his arms crossed and his expression bored, presumably waiting for Jack to do the honours.

_He probably thinks I’m leading him into a trap_ , Jack assumed.

_Even though the only traps here are those villains you warm up to._

An ironic glance at Pitch was all the reply Jack gave to his hissing thoughts. But then a sudden dawning realisation had him stopping cold at the front door.

“Fear,” Pitch murmured.

Jack looked up at him, at the flash of hunger that turned the gold in his eyes a little brilliant, before swallowing and quickly looking away with a nervous laugh. “Haven’t seen these psychos for a while,” he lied. Well, it wasn’t a lie. Not really. But it wasn’t the reason his dread suddenly spiked, reminding him that the idiots inside Yves’s house could support Jack as easily as they could leave him for dead by embarrassing the ever-loving hell out of him.

_And look who I’m presenting them on a silver platter…_

“Why not?”

Pitch’s question was blunt and contained the barest hint of interest. _He’s probably just being polite, though god knows why at this point._

With an easy smile that did very little to hide the twitchiness that Jack was gonna be experiencing until he successfully threatened any and all potential enemies into silence, he said, “Don’t ask when you don’t care.”

Pitch offered him an arched brow and the beginnings of a smirk as Jack nudged the door open with his staff.

The interior of Yves’s house was in pointedly better shape than the exterior, and although the Halloween-enthusiast’s choice of décor left a lot to be desired (his excessive use of pumpkin orange being the prime offence), the house was a den of… homeliness. If Jack was even the right person to be throwing that term around considering his lack of experience with homes in general.

Open archways connected all the rooms on the first floor, sharing a darkly stained wooden floor from the front living and dining areas to the kitchen right at the back of the house. Chandeliers made of bone and wax lit each room, but on Halloween Yves always made sure to put his most immaculately dressed skeletons, each equipped with a metal lantern, on display in every corner of first floor to provide added light to his guests.

Yves was literally the type of host who polished up their best china and acted like it was the usual dinner set just to show it off to their neighbours, and everyone knew it.

_Even though polished china wouldn’t do much good with this bunch,_ Jack thought to himself as he observed the borderline rowdy spirits littering Yves’s home. The place wasn’t packed, not like the human house parties Jack had observed during his wanderings, but there were enough spirits milling around tables, lining the walls and weaving between furniture to make the entire first floor very uninviting to Jack’s claustrophobia.

He looked up at Pitch and saw that the guy was wearing a pinched expression, almost as if he was considering backing out while he still could.

“Upstairs,” Jack told him. Pitch met his eyes and Jack jabbed his staff toward the edge of the staircase that was nestled next to the entrance into the kitchen. “Less people. Slightly more quiet.”

Surprisingly enough, Pitch listened to Jack’s advice without any sort of argument, or even just deciding to leave in general. With his head held high and an aura that had people moving out of his way the second he got too close to them, Pitch carved his way through the chattering freakshow. Making sure to leave the door slightly ajar so the house’s wards wouldn’t activate yet, Jack tagged along just behind him, happy that he didn’t have to hack through the crowd with his staff.

Until he was grabbed by the arm and pulled out of Pitch’s trail.

Panic welled quick and painfully as his back slammed into a wall, the framed portrait of a half-decayed relative of Yves swinging threateningly from the disturbance. Two tall figures suddenly appeared on either side of Jack, and the frost spirit’s panic spluttered into blatant annoyance.

Urie and Grey were a pair of corpses with a general goal in their afterlives to drive Jack up any wall they could get him close to. And not even in the sexual sense – not most of the time, anyway. Ever since they’d once scared the actual wits out of Jack on his first Halloween night here, they’d forever continued constantly harassing him for kicks.

It wasn’t even as if Jack could blame himself for being so spooked by the twins. Grey, once a magician, had had half his face shredded by a lion and the majority of his internal organs devoured by birds he used to keep starved for his twisted shows. Urie, apparently the better looking twin (although one really couldn’t tell nowadays) had been set alight by the husband of woman he’d been found in bed with, and had no eyeballs and skin resembling charcoal to prove it. The pair of them were a frightening sight, and not even morbid curiosity could entice Jack to even be slightly intrigued by them.

“Hey there little Jack,” they said in perfect synchronization.

Jack gritted his teeth. Grey, to his left, plucked the tattered top-hat off his skull and presented Jack with an array of coloured cigar-shaped smokes he’d somehow managed to stash within the garment. Jack just levelled him with a dry look, and Grey grinned with half his face. Urie stole a smoke before Grey could take his hat back, bit the end off and lit it on an ever-burning piece of his hair.

“It’s been a while,” Grey said, returning the hat to his head.

“We missed you,” Urie added, blowing a puff of crimson smoke into Jack’s face.

Jack tried to disperse the spiced smoke with his own icy breath, and glared at the twins. “What do you guys want? I’m busy.”

“Busy walking?”

Jack’s gaze sliced into Grey. “Walking away from you two, yes.”

Urie chuckled. “That’s not very nice, Jack. See, we’re swappin’ stories here. And we’re super curious about yours.”

“Especially since we heard that you’re a Guardian now and all.”

Jack startled a bit at the sound of his title, wondering for a moment how the hell these pieces of trash knew that sort of information. And then Jack decided to actually tune in to what they were saying and his throat went dry.

With smoke cascading over black lips, Urie said airily, “For someone who’s meant to be looking after children, why are you spending these nights hiding out here with the likes of us?”

Grey’s face moved entirely too close to Jack’s. Tendons in his cheek pulled and stretched over exposed teeth as he spoke, and Jack felt a little ill watching the unnatural sight. The corpse murmured, “Won’t you share a secret with us, Jack?”

_What the hell?_

The frost spirit tore his eyes away from Grey’s face and looked out at the rest of the party to try and collect his thoughts.

Why were these two asking him about his past? He’d known them for a hundred and fifty years and not once had they ever cared about anything as serious as Jack’s reason for seeking shelter from the dead. In fact, it was more or less an unspoken rule that a guest should pointedly avoid asking another fellow coward why he or she was running from Yves’s ghostly charges. It was a rule that even Jack had the decency to follow.

More smoke flowed into Jack’s lungs, and the two faces either side of him began to blur.

Shit. They were trying to drug him. Shoving the book under his arm, Jack charged a fist with ice from his staff. He didn’t stop until his skin was so cold a white mist was rising up and entwining with the red smoke. He angrily swatted at the smoke and mist obstructing his vision and went for Grey’s neck (the side that wasn’t torn) to slam the asshole’s head into the wall and free at least one of his sides.

But a tight grip on his swinging arm stopped the movement in its tracks, and Jack growled back at a half-smiling Urie.

Just as Jack was about to use his staff for one of its many intentional purposes and smack Urie into next week (he counted all forms of violence against Grey and Urie reasonable acts of self-defence and thus deserving of little to no remorse) Grey let out a startled curse as he was thrown onto the ground. Jack and Urie both snapped their gazes to the undead magician just in time for Urie to be pried off Jack and tossed, unceremoniously, into the seven-foot lampshade behind him.

Burnt sockets tore toward whoever had taken him out, and as soon as Urie’s hollow gaze landed on the hulking giant glaring down him, he _tsk_ ed in irritation and roughly shoved past Jack to pick up Grey. They dragged themselves away without another word.

Jack exhaled a cold, relieved breath and his eyes glided up to the face of his saviour.

A small grin bloomed when he saw Skreeklavic Shadowbent flashing a fang-filled smile down at him. Ignoring the fact that the looming villain had just saved Jack’s hide, the frost spirit’s entire being was overcome (as it was each time Jack was reunited with the werewolf) by the sheer atrocity that was Skreek’s appearance. His hair was as appalling as ever – Jack and the idiot Phoenix had taken bets one Halloween on how much product Skreek used to keep his dark hair standing at angles that were literally perpendicular to the ground they stood on, and were shocked and slightly impressed when they discovered that he used none at all, that he needed to use product to make his hair _flat_. To make matters worse, his sense of fashion was ridiculous. Jack understood that living as one of the most powerful overlords in Transylvania set up a certain standard of dress, but Skreek took things too far. His collars were forever climbing halfway up his face and his waistcoats were made in the most appalling patterns.

He was a powerful disaster, not to mention a dodgy bastard. But he also had one hell of a good heart when it suited him. That, teamed with his charming smile and a disgustingly dark sense of humour, almost made up for the fact he was a walking eyesore.

“You and Phoenix give me so much grief, I swear I spend more time saving your asses than actually doing anything evil,” the werewolf said with a wicked glint in his green-yellow eyes. His accent was deep and rumbled, dark and rough in a way that sent vibrations straight through Jack’s internal organs and made him feel giddy with a sense of familiarity. It was so different to Pitch’s dark voice, which just snaked around and through Jack’s chest whether he liked it or not.

Jack rolled his eyes at the complaint. “Don’t pretend like you don’t secretly love being a good guy,” he teased, his grin widening when he saw the pained look on Skreek’s face.

“With all your rules and morals? Bleh. I like the dark side too much. And by the way, you’ve got a bit of burnt on you.”

Jack blinked at Skreek, confused at the werewolf’s last comment, before his eyes turned down to the sleeve Skreek pointed at. Jack cringed when he saw streaks of black on his arm, leftovers of Urie’s charcoal exterior, and, grumbling to himself, made to wipe the disgusting stuff off with his other sleeve. “Why do they keep hassling me?” he whined, scrubbing at the spot until there was nothing left but a darkish stain.

With no sympathy, the werewolf barked out a rumbling laugh and swung a huge arm around Jack’s tiny shoulders. The two began to make their way toward the staircase near the kitchen, with Skreek roughly shoving anyone in their path out of the way. A clunking metal sound followed their movements, but with a quick look over Skreek, Jack decided to ignore it. The werewolf usually packed enough weapons under his high-collared blazer to equip an army. Perhaps he just hadn’t secured them all properly tonight.

“And why does it have to be _them_?” Jack continued, much to the amusement of Skreek. “They smell like death and whenever Grey drinks he makes a mess all over the floor.”

That got another short laugh out of the werewolf as he broke through a flirting fae couple so they could ascend the stairs. “You’re a magnet for scoundrels, Jack.”

“Apparently,” Jack grumbled as they left behind the chattering and made their way, quite loudly, up to Yves’s second story – a floor exclusively reserved for Skreek and his crew. “Anyway, how’d you know I was here? Your timing’s a little too good.”

“Doubting my heroic intentions are we?”

“Hey, you said it yourself that you’re an immoral evildoer.”

Skreek grinned at him. “This tall bloke came stalking into the middle of our poker round and informed us that you’d been ambushed by a pair of corpses. Since those slimy twins are the only two undead and the party, I thought I’d plod down and give you a hand.”

Jack tried not to look as surprised as his felt. “He did?”

“In the driest tone, I’m telling ya. And you know what a small world this is, Jack? Turns out, he was the guy who sold me my good rum a couple of years ago!” Without warning, Skreek’s face grew dark and a dangerous shadow skittered over his features. “I barely got a taste in before those damn fae Imperials confiscated the lot of it.”

_Must have been really good booze…_ “Uh, Skreek?”

Like flicking a switch, Skreek’s attention flashed back to Jack, and the frankly terrifying look on his face disappeared. But Jack didn’t have enough time to feel relieved that Skreek wasn’t going to lose his shit and go on a rampage, because a heartbeat later, a nefarious smirk had taken over the werewolf’s face. Jack swallowed.

“The King said before he left that you were whisked in by Pitch Black,” Skreek said, thick eyebrows wiggling. “Well? Where is he? Last I heard of the bloke we’d just cracked open Havið and you were –”

Regretting, not for the first time, ever letting Phoenix use him as a guinea pig while testing out one of Yves’s skulls, Jack forced Skreek to stop just before they got to the top of the stairs. He turned an incredulous look up to the werewolf and let the look permeate Skreek’s thick skull.

It took the werewolf a solid minute, during which Jack assumed he was too hung up on the embarrassing story involving Havið and entirely too much trust invested in too many idiots. But then Skreek’s eyes narrowed, and he glanced up in the direction they were once headed.

“You’re screwing with me,” he blurted suddenly.

Jack just gave him a bland look when Skreek turned his eyes down to him. “I really am not.”

The werewolf used his arm to drag Jack closer to him and Jack tried not to cringe at how cramped he felt in the tiny stairwell. Skreek bent down and muttered, sceptically, “You, Jack Romanov Frost, are telling me that the grumpy bastard who sold me my rum is the _Nightmare King_?”

Jack recoiled, appalled. “My middle name is not Romanov! I don’t even have a middle name!”

“Shh!” Skreek hissed, yanking Jack back. “That’s not what’s important here, John. Is he or isn’t he?

The frost spirit took a deep breath through his nose so he wouldn’t ice Skreek’s face off then and there. In a low voice, he warned, “Call me John again and I’m never gonna get you some of North’s Christmas cake.” Icy eyes slid to his right, and he smirked a little when he saw that Skreek looked genuinely upset. “I know how much you’ve always wanted to try it.”

The werewolf sniffed. “That is a serious threat. I’ll acquiesce. But more to the point –”

“Yes that is Pitch,” Jack sighed, because Skreek was seriously as tenacious as a dog with a bone. “I hope you didn’t say anything embarrassing to him.”

“Ha!” Skreek boomed, letting Jack reset himself comfortably on the ground just so Skreek could haul him up the last few stairs. “Not yet I haven’t.”

“Please, Skreek,” Jack hissed, stumbling into the second-floor hallway. “For the sake of all the centuries we’ve known each other, _please_ don’t.”

“Being worried doesn’t suit you, Jack. Anyway, I’m curious about the guy.” Skreek’s eyes flashed a sinful shade of green. “What are you going to do to stop me?”

_Summon a blizzard and bury your stupid ass under it_ , he internally grumbled. But the second the thought flew through his mind, a sickening pang dug claws into Jack’s internal organs and _clenched_. He gasped, ducked out of Skreek’s hold and nearly fell into a darkly wall-papered wall.

“What’s up?” Skreek asked, furrowing his brow.

Jack shook his head as he took long, semi-calming breaths. “I don’t know.”

_Denial_ , his mind snarled, and a forest of white flashed across his vision.

Jack winced it away before it could fully manifest, and Skreek made a rude noise. “You know what your problem is, Jack? You don’t eat enough. You’re too skinny.”

The frost spirit gave Skreek a dry look. “You and the King need to lay off. My weight hasn’t changed in three hundred years, and I am _not_ skinny. Or bony. My size is perfectly healthy –”

“Well, we’ll just have to get an outsider’s opinion on your white boy ass, won’t we?”

Jack didn’t like the sound of that one bit, and he was about to voice his opinion (and perhaps silence Skreek permanently) when Skreek turned and emerged from the narrow hallway into the second-floor sitting room. “Look who I found!” he bellowed.

Jack grunted and shoved himself away from the wall to follow after the evil wolf.

The second-floor sitting room was a spacious area with an entire wall of floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out onto the back fields. The room’s chandelier was grander than those in the rest of the house, the ceilings higher and the floor mostly covered with a rich wine-coloured rug that felt like heaven beneath Jack’s feet. On the wall to the left of the windows was a fireplace whose mantle stood taller than Jack, huge grey stones holding fast in an exterior wall that was probably more pumpkin than brick. The fireplace was the guardian of several tiny fire sprites who all danced around in circles in the safety of its ash, and as a guardian it took its job seriously to the point that for every ounce of warmth the fire radiated, the fireplace expelled ten times more hostility, in case any soul sought to come near its tiny flames.

Everyone (except for Phoenix, that late idiot) had already made themselves at home in front of the fire. Chairs from all corners of the house – wooden chairs from the kitchen, a hole-ridden sofa from the attic, and some luxurious armchairs from the bedrooms – had been pulled up around a card table, around which four members of Skreek’s werewolf horde had set up a grossly unconventional game of poker.

They had also somehow managed to get Pitch to take a seat on one of the nicer armchairs, and Clyde, a blond wolf with half his head shaved and covered in a gang tattoo, was trying to get him to take a hand of cards.

Skreek clunked his way over to a wooden chair and fell heavily onto the sturdy wood as he told Clyde to quit giving Pitch a hard time. Jack watched with suspicion as Skreek proceeded to casually pour himself a drink, as if the werewolf undertook good deeds for strangers all the time and was not at all deserving of the raised eyebrows he was being given by all of his werewolves. Even Pitch had narrowed eyes slightly, as if trying to sus out the motives of the werewolf.

_At least Pitch is perceptive enough to realise that Skreek’s chivalry is dodgy at best_ , he thought as he wandered over to the fireplace. The stones shifted slightly when Jack got within touching distance of its ash pit, and before the fireplace could toss out a rock and brain Jack all in the name of protecting its firelings, Jack held up his book and asked the mantle, “Can you look after this so I don’t lose it?”

The fireplace, as good of a host as it was fierce and protective (it was a member of Yves’s household, after all), procured two skulls – both missing their bottom jaws – from thin air, which came gliding along the top of the mantle. Jack had to stand on his toes to be able to put his book up between the skulls, which clamped together as soon as Jack let go. The frost spirit gave the stone mantle a good pat in thanks, and the stones rumbled threateningly in response.

“Move away from the fire sprites, I get it,” Jack uttered with a small chuckle as he turned back toward the others just in time for Skreek to throw his leg up onto the wooden chair beside him.

The violent _bang_ of metal hitting wood made Jack’s thoughts stutter, and he looked over Skreek more thoroughly this time.

“Why do you sound like you’re carrying an arsenal around with you?”

Skreek’s eyebrows did their creepy wiggling thing again. “Wanna take a look?”

Xani, a werewolf with an impeccable amount of patience (from dealing with Skreek and his mostly-male pack) and an auburn warrior braid that reached halfway down her back, sighed heavily. “Why do you keep trying to show it off at parties?”

Jack looked between the wolves. “Show off what?”

Without answering, Skreek yanked up his pant leg and displayed the limb that was resting on the other chair.

Or, more accurately, the lack of a limb.

Jack’s stomach turned to lead at the sight of the thick strips of metal and leather. “Skreek,” he croaked, eyes wide and glued to the robotic construction. “What happened?”

Skreek laughed, like the maniac he was, and thwacked the giant prosthetic leg with a large hand. “This old thing? I’ve been breaking it in for nearly three years now. Pretty flash, hey?”

_His leg_ … “You’re meant to be a werewolf, aren’t you?” Jack exclaimed, horrified. “ _Why is your leg missing?_ ”

Skreek shrugged as if the missing limb was no big deal _at all_ and casually said, “Tried to take on the Imperial army and got hit with a poisoned sword. Those fae, I tell ya, they come up with some painful weapons.”

Jack’s concern was promptly gouged out and disposed of by his disbelief. “You attacked the fae Imperial army,” he deadpanned.

“Don’t go judging me here, Jack. It wasn’t like I went out and took on _Boreas_. I just wanted the kegs of rum those stuck up pricks stole from me.”

Jack’s eyebrow twitched. “You told me they were confiscated.”

Skreek rolled his eyes. “Same thing. Besides, how was I meant to know that the rum was illegal?” he said indignantly.

“I told you it was.”

Five sets of yellow-tinged eyes and one set of icy blue shot straight to Pitch as he spoke. The Nightmare King looked bored, but the fact that he was speaking up made Jack think that he was acting on a defensive impulse. After a moment’s pause, Skreek was suddenly under the incredibly indignant scrutiny of his wolves.

“You told us you didn’t know it was illegal!” Tanton exclaimed, the chain piercing running from his lip to his ear rattling as he spoke.

“We fought for days in mud and rain,” Xani said with eyes wide and damning.

“My tat got sliced so bad I had to have it re-inked,” Clyde said, pointing to the shaved half of his head.

“And you lost your leg to that hellish soldier,” Yanov, probably the most sensible of Skreek’s horde, uttered in his baritone voice. Skreek and Yanov locked eyes, and Yanov’s gaze held as strong as the product keeping his thick hair slicked back.

Skreek growled at them all. “I decide what battles are worth out efforts,” he said, sounding (as he rarely did) like the terrifying werewolf leader that he was. “If you have a problem with that then I’ll have you sweeping the fortress the next time we have a war to fight.”

The wolves mumbled a few half-hearted apologies, and Skreek procured himself a bowl of mixed nuts to chew out his frustration on. Since there were no chairs left to sit on (with Skreek’s leg taking up the last available space), Jack awkwardly hung around near the corner of the group, on the side of the fireplace.

When the silence left in the wake of the wolves’ argument became unbearable (to Jack, at least), he uttered, “Has Phoenix gotten dumber since the last time I came here?”

Skreek grunted. “Without you to fetch his ass, he normally rocks up this late.” A peanut missile was thrown, hitting Jack in the cheek before he got the chance to defend himself. The nut fell within a few inches of the fire pit, and ash blew out of the fireplace on a short, angry gust, tossing the peanut as far away as possible from the fire sprites.

“Speak of the devil,” Clyde said with a wolfish grin just as Xani murmured, “I smell fire.”

A figure abruptly came marching out of the second-floor hallway, and Jack felt his chest tighten when he caught sight of Phoenix von Cinder looking about as impressed as a predator that’d just had its dinner stolen. With eyes that burnt dozens of shades of red and gold, Phoenix locked onto Jack the second he stepped into the room, and Jack felt like hiding in the fireplace when he saw those red-gold orbs flare in anger.

“Don’t ruin the furniture,” Skreek muttered in warning as Phoenix passed him.

But Phoenix wasn’t even listening. Fury rolled off his body in waves, probably blocking out the sight and sound of anything and everyone other than Jack. He didn’t stop stalking until the two were standing toe-to-toe, Phoenix’s combat boots threatening to crush Jack’s exposed feet as he breathed too-hot air into Jack’s face.

“Look who finally decided to grace us with his presence,” Phoenix breathed, his face drawing so close to Jack’s that his mess of crimson-orange bangs scratched against Jack’s cheekbone.

But Jack refused to be intimidated. Especially not by Phoenix, who was more than adequately generous with his anger. “Speak for yourself, at least I know how to tell the time.”

_I haven’t seen him look this mad in so long_ , he thought as the fire spirit, with an angry shake of his head, drew back a pace.

Jack thought about doing the same, at least to give Phoenix some space to cool down so they could talk out their shit properly.

But his plan was foiled not a second later when an ember-speckled fist flew at his face.

The hit connected with a burst of sparks and a loud curse from the recipient, and Jack hit the ground from the sheer force of it. Hot pain bloomed over his cheek and he glared up at Phoenix.

“What the hell was that for?”

“I’m angry at you,” Phoenix said as he came at Jack again.

On instinct, Jack drew his staff up between the two of them and shot a blast of cold at Phoenix. The fire spirit swore, then did the stupidest thing and grabbed the staff to try and yank it out of Jack’s grasp.

“Fuck,” Phoenix yelled, tucking his hands under his armpits to warm them back up again. “Get rid of that so I can hit you properly.”

_What?_ “No way!” Jack said, indignant.

Phoenix’s eyes flashed bright and hot and Jack felt his skin prickle. “I said,” he growled, slapping Jack’s hands away and grabbing for his hoodie. He hauled Jack to his feet and spat, “Get rid of it,” in Jack’s face with enough venom to make the frost spirit flinch.

Before Jack could react – or blast the asshole with another dousing of cold – Phoenix was tossing him to the floor roughly and with a swift kick to the stomach, managed to dislodge the staff. He sent it sailing over the other side of the room on a wicked spin that Tanton, Clyde, and Xani all had to duck to avoid. Jack belatedly heard the wolves abuse Phoenix for his careless aim, but Phoenix was too focused to listen to their insults, and Jack was too busy wheezing to appreciate them. Clutching at his stomach, he cursed the jackass kneeling beside him.

“Got nothing to hide behind now, huh?” he said with the cruellest smile.

Adrenaline and anger finally managed to punch their way through Jack’s shock. He had seriously forgotten how much of an asshole Phoenix could be. Between hoarse breaths, Jack gasped, “You’re just…scared…of being…turned…into a popsicle,” before throwing civility to the wind and spitting in Phoenix’s face.

Phoenix just laughed as he wiped his chin with the back of his hand. “Your face is still as hard as ever, you know that?” he said, ignoring Jack’s taunt and making a point to shake out the hand he’d hit Jack with a few minutes ago.

Jack glared at him, and tried to roll back to get away from the psycho, but Phoenix landed a sharpened elbow in the same spot he’d just kicked him. The frost spirit grunted as pain stabbed through his torso.

“So don’t hit it!” Jack managed, coughing.

Phoenix looked at him like he must’ve been joking. “You disappeared without a backwards glance for ten years and come back expecting me not to clock ya? Damn, those Guardian freaks have really done a number on your intelligence.”

Jack ground his teeth. “They’re not freaks,” he said crossly. “Shut your damn mouth, Phoenix.”

The fire spirit licked his lips. “Stop talking like a wimp and fight me then.”

_He’s baiting you_ , Jack’s mind dully informed him.

“Don’t care,” Jack snarled as he lunged for the bastard’s face. Phoenix, the idiot, obviously wasn’t expecting an attack so soon, and Jack had just enough time to get a hand around the fire spirit’s neck and smash their foreheads together in a head-butt that left them both reeling.

With Phoenix’s cursing in the back of his mind, Jack clutched his head and groaned as he struggled to his feet.

“Damn you,” Phoenix grunted into the palm of his hand.

“Damn _me_?” Jack snapped at him. “Don’t go picking fights with people who can take you!”

A rude laugh rattled from Phoenix’s throat, and a crimson eye flashed at Jack. “It’s been a while. Do you think you still can?”

Jack watched in wary confusion as Phoenix wobbled to his feet.

Then proceeded to light a fireball in the palm of his hand.

“Should we break them up?” Jack heard Yanov ask blandly.

As he began backing up for the sake of his life, Jack noticed that Skreek just waved a dismissive hand toward them. “Nah, let Phoenix get this out of his system. He’ll be insufferable otherwise.”

_Left for dead it seems._

“Great,” he muttered, watching as the flame rolled barely an inch above Phoenix’s skin. “Yves is gonna kill you if you destroy his carpet.”

The flames curled back through Phoenix’s knuckles until his entire hand was engulfed. “It’ll be worth it,” he growled, and threw a fireball straight at Jack’s head.

Although Jack knew he’d be branded with just as much blame as Phoenix for destroying Yves’s favourite sitting room, in that moment getting set alight was his greater concern. Ducking, Jack leapt out of the way of the first fireball, which went sailing past him and into a small coffee table. He narrowly avoided copping a second to the side of his face, before he dove behind the seating arrangement to stay clear of the third, which exploded in a bowl Yanov had strategically raised to protect his face.

As he rolled over onto his side on the thick carpet, a nervous, almost insane bubble of laughter escaped his throat at the absurdity that was Phoenix and his rage. “You’re still shit at aiming, dickwad!” Jack hollered over the seats, and his mouth twitched a little when he heard a growl explode out of Phoenix in response.

_Our staff is just a little closer to the window. Grab it._

Jack’s eyes flickered over to his left, and he was about to reach for his precious staff when a line of fire roared up where his hand had been stretched over. He yelped in pain and drew his arm back just as Phoenix rounded the chairs and lined Jack up for a killing blow.

“If you want to fight, let me get to my staff!” he shouted at the fire spirit.

Phoenix narrowed his eyes. “Fight me like a man.”

Jack scrambled to his feet, but not fast enough to skirt around the fourth fireball. The bundle of flames hit him directly in his side, setting his hoodie alight and sending a hot streak of panic and pain through Jack’s body.

He frantically swiped at the flames with his cold hands, patting the flames to extinguish the sparks, but the fire was as tenacious as Phoenix and refused to be doused. Driven by pure instinct, Jack went for his staff one last time, not even caring that Phoenix was standing in the way of it. His panic had turned his mind into a singular focus, and he needed to put out the fire before the cold under his skin couldn’t endure the heat any longer and he was scarred.

_Again_.

Jack swung at the fire spirit with all that he had. Hand to hand combat had never been his strong suit – after all, he had a staff that was directly tapped into Winter’s powers – but years spent with Phoenix and his rage had taught Jack that sometimes backing down was definitely not the answer. Especially if Phoenix was the opponent in question, in which case wussing out just made him _angrier_. And so Jack’s desperate last-ditch fighting style was born.

Surprise flickered in Phoenix’s eyes when he saw Jack’s fist flying at him, but since the douchebag had superb reflexes, he dodged the hit simply by tilting his head to the side. Jack grunted at the effort of halting his momentum before he could break his hand on the wall of glass behind Phoenix, and drew his elbow back and straight into Phoenix’s nape.

“Ouch! Shit,” the fire spirit cussed, staggering forward and out of Jack’s way. Jack was quick to scoop up his staff and send a waft of icy air straight to his hoodie, which for some reason had reduced to nothing but an ember-lit smoulder. It was then that he noticed, out of the corner of his eye, that the fire sprites in the fireplace seemed to be absorbing up all the flames in the room. With little excited bursts of energy, any available flame flickering where it shouldn’t was drawn into the ash pit and gobbled up by the sprites.

_At least someone’s looking out for me_ , Jack thought as the blissful feeling of cold coasted over his too-warm flesh. His eyes flickered over the audience semi-paying attention to Phoenix’s tantrum, and his brow twitched when he saw that Tanton and Clyde were pretending to pass popcorn to each as they watched.

_Bunch of assholes_ , he added when he noticed that Skreek and Yanov were huddling in their own personal conversation, and Xani was glaring, raptly, into the bottom of her empty glass.

Pitch, though… he looked delightfully vexed as his narrowed gaze focused on the movements of Phoenix. Jack felt embarrassed (for himself alone since he couldn’t give a shit about Phoenix’s dignity in that moment) and his eyes quickly left Pitch before the Nightmare King could notice he’d been looking.

“Oi, shit-face. Keep your eyes on me.”

Jack glared back at Phoenix, and the next fireball that came at him was easily deflected by the staff. Phoenix grumbled angrily and extinguished the flames.

“Get over yourself,” Jack said, pressing a cold hand to the exposed skin of his waist.

Phoenix gaped. “Get over myself? Who the fuck are you to tell me that when you’re the one who thinks he’s so great and fancy, flying around with Father fucking Christmas because we’re suddenly not good enough anymore.”

In a flash, Phoenix was right in front of Jack, stabbing a burning finger into Jack’s chest. “You’ll run off with the first group who wants something to do with you. Who says you’re _special_. Who gives you an initiation and says welcome to your new family. You deal yourself out to whoever will take you to help you fill that cold, dead chest of yours and you forget all about _us_.”

The more Phoenix talked, the more Jack felt like kneeing the other man in the face. Jack knew what the fire spirit was really trying to say, beneath all that insulting bullshit he was using just to humiliate him. Phoenix was angry and he was hurt and he didn’t know any other way to deal with it other than share his pain.

_You forget about me,_ was what he was really saying.

_You forget about what you did with me._

_You forget about what_ you did.

Every time Phoenix’s finger pressed into his hoodie, Jack could feel the material burning away and leave behind tiny seared holes. He face flushed cold under the weight of Phoenix’s words, under the weight of the stares of the others in the room, all of which had most definitely decided to tune in at this point. The smell of singed fibres wafted straight up Jack’s nose, mixing with the scent of ash and hot smoke, and he sneezed right into Phoenix’s face.

“For fuc – _gross_. _Ugh_.”

Jack took advantage of Phoenix’s moment of disgust and smacked the hand away. “You don’t know anything,” he said, storming past the fire spirit to the other side of the table. Thanks to the Grand Buttwipe, he was going to have to find some spare clothes somewhere now that his hoodie was half-burnt and reeked. He kept his hand plastered to his exposed waist as he walked. The feeling of rough skin beneath his fingers made his irritation flare violently.

“And look, he’s still running.”

“Phoenix, enough,” Skreek finally said.

“I don’t take orders from you, old man,” Phoenix snarled at the wolf. Skreek twitched, as if he was contemplating getting up and showing Phoenix exactly _why_ he should be taking orders from the werewolf overlord.

Phoenix didn’t even register Skreek as a threat in that moment, though. Jack met his eyes as he was about to make a break for it, but his feet stopped short when he saw the pain in Phoenix’s expression. Hurt was entwining with the anger in his molten eyes, clutching and grabbing and choking until Jack felt a very bad feeling settle in his gut. His blunt nails dug into his skin. “Phoenix –”

“Don’t you look at me like that,” the fire spirit spat. “You have no right to look at me like that after just _leaving_ for an _entire_ _decade_ without a single word. Did you even _think_ about us when you were off with your new _buddies_? While you were saving children for the sole purpose of helping yourself forget that you’re really just nothing more than a dead frost spirit and was only ever actually _useful_ when you were spreading your legs for –”

_Smash_.

The entire room froze as the sound of shattered glass _plink_ _plink_ ed onto the section of wooden floor the carpet didn’t cover.

Jack’s hand shook, his mind pulsing black at the edges. He hadn’t even _thought_ before he’d snatched Skreek’s drink straight out of the werewolf’s hand and thrown it. And now Phoenix was just staring at him, eyes wide as blood trailed down the side of his face.

Jack’s whole body began to tremble, his breathing hitched and stuttered as regret began to flood into and meld with the horror in Phoenix’s eyes.

He had to leave. Had to run, to _breathe_. But he couldn’t get outside, could he? The doors and windows were bolted to keep the spirits out and he was trapped in this house, trapped with the words Phoenix had nearly finished speaking. Jack clutched at his staff and told his feet to _move_. Even if he couldn’t get outside, couldn’t make a pile of snow in the kitchen to hide in because of his fear of Yves’s wrath, he could at least stumble down the stairs to where the air would be cooler and a secluded corner somewhere would welcome him into its solitary embrace.

_If that’s what you want, coward, then go already_.

Jack hoarsely mumbled some lame excuse about cleaning up the mess before he spun and all but ran from the room.

“I’m not a coward,” he choked as he blew through the hallway.

_Liar_.

“Shut up. _Shut up_. You don’t know anything so just –”

Jack didn’t even get the chance to make it to the stairwell before he was grabbed by scorching hot hands and hauled back against a bedroom door.

Wide, bewildered eyes focused upon Phoenix’s half-crumpled face, and Jack tried to fight, tried to free himself, because Phoenix was caging him and his panic was screaming at him to run, he just needed to RUN.

“Breathe for me,” Phoenix murmured, carding a burning hand, sticky with liquor, gently down the side of Jack’s face. Jack wrenched his face away from that hand, too on edge to want to be touched, and tried to even his breathing out.

“I really hate you sometimes,” Jack told him shakily. His staff clattered to the floor beside their feet, and Jack knotted his fingers in the fabric of his hoodie to give himself something to hang onto.

Phoenix looked sorry, he really did. There was an apology written all through his fiery eyes, creased lines of remorse crawling over his tanned face. Phoenix’s guilt was about the only thing that kept Jack from hitting the bastard in the nose while he had an opening. “I didn’t mean for that last bit to come out,” the fire spirit said softly.

It was the best apology Jack was ever gonna get, not that he really cared for Phoenix’s grovelling. If Jack had let Phoenix finish his sentence – hell, even _without_ finishing that damning line, Phoenix had nearly spat one of Jack’s best kept shames onto the card table in front of their closest companions in nothing but anger. A simple apology was all well and good but it didn’t erase memories.

“And I didn’t mean it either,” Phoenix added.

Jack tilted his head back against the wall and squeezed his eyes shut. His breaths were still a little ragged, but he was nearly calm again. Upset and angry and wishing he could just peel himself out of his skin and fly off, but at least no longer on the verge of hyperventilating. “So you meant all the rest of it?”

“You fucking deserved the rest of it.”

Jack’s eyes snapped open and he gaped at the man in front of him. “What the hell? You suck at apologies.”

Phoenix just offered him a wry smile. “You knew that already though.”

The two stared at each other for a moment, caught by hurt and guilt and the fact that in nearly two hundred years, this last decade had been the longest they had been apart.

_We don’t age, we don’t change, we just rely on each other more than we should._

A trickle of blood came cascading out of Phoenix’s closely cropped hairline – the left side of his hair was cut nearly to his scalp, while his right was longer and spikier and most of the time maintained in complete disarray – and Jack’s brows pulled together at the sight of it. He grabbed Phoenix’s nose before the man could pull away, and dabbed at the wound with his only clean sleeve.

Phoenix let him with merely a grumpy expression, probably because the fire spirit was still trying to suck up to Jack. But after a moment his eyes flickered down to the burnt hole in Jack’s hoodie, probably inspecting the damage he did, and a hint of darkness swept over his features.

When Jack realised what was in Phoenix’s line of sight, he let go of the fire spirit and pulled the singed hole in his hoodie together.

“Go find something else to wear,” Phoenix told him, his gaze still levelled at Jack’s waist. “Yves should have a spare shirt or something lying around in one of these bedrooms. I guess I’ll get a broom.”

A dark eyebrow quirked. “So no more fireballs?”

Fiery eyes rose. “Only if that fucker Clyde tries to steal my drink,” Phoenix promised with a toothy smile.

Then, surprising Jack with a rare display of touch, Phoenix shifted his boots on either side of Jack’s feet and tilted his head in toward the frost spirit’s. Their foreheads touched, ice and heat nearly sizzling at the contact, and Phoenix winced, minutely, before his eyes travelled once over Jack’s features. “I missed your stupid face, Frost.”

The tender action had Jack sighing a silent breath of icy air. “I missed yours too,” he murmured as the warmth began to sting his skin.

Phoenix pulled back with a grimace and rubbed his forehead too roughly. When his hand strayed too close to where the glass must have broken his skin, he hissed in pain and drew back fingers dusted with a dark rouge.

Jack just laughed at him, chuckling at the other man’s expense while he tried to force the sickening feeling still moping around in his gut to just leave already. With a cross frown, Phoenix roughly shoved his hand into Jack’s hair, mussing up the frost spirit’s look with a shit-eating grin while Jack yelled at him for wiping blood on him.

Phoenix was stomping off down the stairs before Jack could even get a good hit in, throwing him a middle finger over his shoulder as he left. Hands inching into his hair, Jack’s fingers tightened on the strands as his legs finally gave out and he sank onto the floor.

Exhaling a breath, Jack drew his knees to his chest.

_“…nothing more than a dead frost spirit….”_

_“…only ever actually useful when you were spreading your legs for –”_

His scalp was starting to ache, but the pain was easier to deal with than the churning shame conjured by those words. He knew they were true, deep in a heart that somehow still beat, still found new and painful ways to hide from scary situations, and was probably more ice than organ, he _knew_. And he hated himself for it. But they were _his_ problems. _His_ insecurities. Not meant for the ears of Skreek and Clyde and Tanton and Xani and Yanov and –

Pitch.

His heart stopped dead in his chest.

Pitch had heard what Phoenix had said, hadn’t he?

He’d heard. He _knew_.

_Pitch doesn’t care about you._

Jack flinched. Slowly, he curled tighter against himself. A streak of boiling irritation slashed through his ribcage, nearly powerful enough to stretch out and latch hold of the shame that was threatening to choke the spirit.

_Or your petty little problems._

Jack’s eyes slid toward the doorway, warm light inviting him back into the sitting room. He was weak and he was insecure, he knew that. But Pitch and Skreek and the wolves, they had bigger things on their plates than Jack’s issues, didn’t they? Skreek was constantly at war and Pitch…

_Does. Not. Care._

And if they did, if anyone thought to pry, he could always lie.

_So stop crying over the opinion of an evil asshole and pull yourself together._

Fingers untangling from his sore head, he dug them into the door behind him and pulled himself to his feet. Collecting his staff and setting the cool wood by his ear, he blew one last puff of chilly air above his head and tried to channel his cold through his veins, a last attempt at regaining equilibrium in his body.

Then he began his search.

The bedrooms in Yves’s house were dark and well furnished with spacious beds and articles of questionable artistic nature hanging on the walls. Three of the four bedrooms were unlocked, but after a swift pilfering, Jack realised that the guest rooms were kept as immaculate as the rest of the house and there wasn’t a hope in hell of him finding some stray clothing.

After being informed by a tall wooden wardrobe that his eyes were pretty (to which Jack had no idea how to respond, and so the wardrobe refused to open with a stubborn _hmph_ ), he gave up his search. Pulling the hole in his hoodie tight, and taking a deep determined breath, he stormed back out to the others.

To his intense relief, everyone except Yanov and Skreek paid Jack no attention when he remerged from the hallway. Clyde and Tanton were in the middle of trying to get Pitch to show them some of his shadows, while Xani just watched with veiled judgement as she drank.

When he was at Skreek’s shoulder, Jack said, “Does Yves have any spare clothes in his room? It’s locked so I can’t get in.”

Skreek took one look over the mess that was Jack’s hoodie and grimaced in sympathy. “He didn’t give me the key, sorry lad. Just throw it out and pick up a new one when we all leave. It’s not like you wear it to keep you warm, right?”

Jack smiled nervously. “And walk around half-naked in front of perverts like you? No thanks.”

“Can’t Phoenix lend you anything?” Yanov suggested.

“All he’s in is that stupid singlet,” Jack said.

Xani, deciding that this was an appropriate time to tune in, gagged and said, “And then we’d have to deal with _him_ half-naked.”

_Not that he’d strip for anyone here anyway_ , Jack thought as his nails grazed, absently, over the raised skin under his rib.

Just as Jack was about to suggest he should go and find some plastered spirit down stairs and start stripping them of their garments, a dark bundle was shoved at him from his left, and Jack jerked in surprise.

Pitch was holding out his coat to him, the long dark material hitting the floor even though it was half slung over Pitch’s arm. The man stared at Jack with an expressionless look, his arm unwavering as it remained extended toward Jack.

_Well, fuck._

With hands that, embarrassingly, shook more than they should have, Jack took the coat from Pitch’s arm and, with one last cautionary look at the Nightmare King, rested his staff on the back of the armchair and slung the heavy garment over his shoulders. The material itself was a little coarse, but the strips of leather were well-worn and the collar soft against Jack’s neck. Pitch kept his eyes on Jack as the frost spirit fastened the buttons down his chest with trembling fingers, his head going a little light at how large the coat was, at how small he himself was in comparison. He even had to roll the cuffs of the sleeves back, which he did so clumsily as he tried, all the while, to distract himself from the fact that the coat was still warm from Pitch’s body heat.

For an absurd moment, Jack thought he might cry. Taking a small breath, he looked down at Pitch and with a grateful smile said, “Thanks.”

Pitch simply ran two gold-grey eyes over him in response, sending a cold flush through Jack before the Nightmare King looked away as if the exchange had never happened.

A little happy, Jack perched himself on the arm of Pitch’s chair since there were still no spare spots and Pitch was apparently in a cooperative mood. Jack received a suspicious look as he crossed his legs and wedged his staff in the nook of his knee to keep it safe, but he ignored it in favour of sneering at the lecherous expression Skreek subtly shot him from his right.

Giving up on trying to get Pitch to show them some cool trick, Clyde and Tanton joined forces and began shuffling the deck of sacred cards they insisted on using every Halloween for their annual card game.

As Tanton counted up the players, Phoenix waltzed back into the sitting room equipped with a long wooden broom. But before he could start cleaning up his mess (which was really Jack’s mess, but Jack still hadn’t quite forgiven him yet), a skeleton in a tuxedo appeared beside Phoenix and offered a bony hand for the broom. With a confused frown, Phoenix handed over the broom, and the skeleton shoved its lantern into Phoenix’s chest.

“Ha! Looks like the butlers don’t trust you with clean-up duty,” Skreek jeered as the skeleton began to do an immaculate job of cleaning up the broken glass.

Clutching the large metal lantern to his chest, Phoenix made a face at Skreek. “They’re on Yves’s payroll. They probably don’t trust anyone.” Then his eyes flickered over to Jack and he frowned. “I didn’t know Yves had –”

And then the dark figure next to Jack finally – _finally_ – caught Phoenix’s eye, and the fire spirit all but dropped the lantern in his hand when he realised who was at Jack’s side.

The frost spirit smirked as Phoenix’s face grew incredibly pale. “The Nightmare King is here,” Phoenix breathed, eyes wide and terror wafting off his person.

Jack glanced to his left and saw Pitch take in a long, deep breath, his eyes falling shut for a moment before they opened again and gold flashed at Phoenix. Jack swore he could hear Phoenix’s heart stop then and there.

“Oh really?” Skreek asked, his voice infused with faux surprise as his mouth began to tilt into a wicked grin.

“We hadn’t noticed,” Xani said dryly.

“Your observational skills are at their peak, Phoenix,” Yanov said in a monotone as he watched Clyde and Tanton shuffle with careful suspicion.

“It’s not like he’s been here the whole time or anything,” Jack added, his smirk deepening when Phoenix flushed.

Phoenix grumbled, embarrassed and afraid, before stomping over to the chair Skreek had his metal leg resting on. “Weren’t you two at war or something?” he said, sending a confused glance between Jack and Pitch as he rudely tipped Skreek’s leg off the chair.

As Skreek cursed Phoenix for being a brat, Jack stiffened. Trust Phoenix to bring up the worst possible memory just as the atmosphere was starting to relax. Jack chanced a glance at Pitch, to see if the slice of reality had jarred him out of his amicable mood and whether or not Jack should give his coat back and find himself somewhere else to sit.

Pitch’s brow had creased, but whether it was in annoyance or anger Jack couldn’t tell.

The frost spirit brushed his thumbs over his staff nervously, unsure of what to say that could break this heavy silence without incurring Pitch’s wrath. After all, it had been a war Pitch had lost, and Jack was pretty sure the Nightmare King had not forgotten the position Jack and the Guardians had put him in.

Xani, a warrior in wolf skin, slammed her drink onto the table, dispersing the silence. In a firm, unwavering tone, she said, “Well they’re not at war tonight, are they?”

Icy eyes flew to her, then trickled back to Pitch to see that the man’s scowl had vanished and been replaced, instead, with a look of wary confusion.

Jack’s shoulders relaxed a bit at the absence of hostility in Pitch’s new expression. He leaned back against the corner of the armchair as Clyde began handing around cards and thought, softly, _It’s a start at least._

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you again for the lovely comments and kudos!!


	7. In Our Town Of... (Part II)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Pitch is exposed to what the commoners call "banter", gets harassed into socialising, and reintroduced to some emotions he doesn't know how to handle.

Pitch was an adaptable man.

He was a strategist. A manipulator. A warlord and a conqueror. If he wasn’t prepared for unforeseen circumstances, he would have been destroyed eons ago by the countless enemies seeking to bury him. Not just enemies fighting in the name of good, either. Being evil itself had its draw backs – meaning that whenever Pitch acquired a sketchy ally, there were at least a dozen other villains who wanted to take the skin off his back because they were all a bunch of dishonourable lunatics.

And so he _had_ to be an adaptable man. His existence and the state of his skin depended on it.

_And yet._

And yet here he was, trapped by powerful wards in the home of the Halloween King and surrounded by a werewolf overlord, the most infamous members of his pack, and a ridiculously high ranking noble of the Summer Court.

And beside him sat a Guardian who’d once turned down the only offer of alliance he’d ever had any emotional investment in, and then proceeded to stake his claim on the _other side_ of the war ground.

This situation was barely computing in Pitch’s adapting system.

His fingers flexed around the glass he had been forcefully given, untouched alcohol disturbing with the movement, and Pitch frowned down into the golden liquid.

_“Well they’re not at war tonight, are they?”_

This, he had no words for.

But that was just his own fault, wasn’t it?

He had chosen this. He’d taken the tenuous conflict between craving company as any living soul reasonably should, and settling for the solitude his position as the Nightmare King wordlessly demanded – a conflict overseen and mocked ever so often by his dignity – and offered the former side a weapon for once. He had turned his back on the isolation the shadows so loved to fester in, and left the aristocracy he was meant to be courting (for the sake of his own place as king) for dead.

In exchange for such obscene company.

_And two nights free from my Nightmares_ , he thought with an adequate dosing of self-disgust.

“Pitch,” Clyde said, drawing the Nightmare King’s semi-scowling gaze to the wolf as he began taping two cards to his forehead. “How many cards you need?”

After taking a moment to judge Clyde harshly, Pitch’s gaze scanned the circle of wolves and spirits, noting that nearly everyone had acquired a small pile of cards. He had a terrible feeling that whatever the wolf was saying involved Pitch engaging socially with the mismatched group he was sitting amongst. “I do not wish to play,” he stated firmly.

“Well that’s too bad since we already divided up the deck,” the wolf replied with a smile so easily worn Pitch nearly questioned, not for the first time that night, whether these wolves really knew who they were talking to.

_Or maybe they just do not care_ , he thought after a moment’s contemplation. His eyes slid beyond the frost spirit on his right and he sized up Skreeklavic Shadowbent for about the third time since he’d first walked into the sitting room and stopped short at the sight of the werewolf. Perhaps these wolves weren’t perturbed by Pitch because their leader was one of the dastardliest fiends in the Northern Hemisphere, a villain whose wars Pitch had heard deliciously horrifying stories of. Stories that had both inspired and stirred envy within the Nightmare King.

Skreeklavic swatted away the fireball he was being threatened with, and grabbed the fire spirit in a headlock, chortling to himself as the spirit in his hold swore and bucked fiercely.

Pitch nearly laughed at the pedestal Skreeklavic had somehow acquired in his imagination.

The werewolf throwing nuts into his open mouth as he attacked that irritating fire spirit was not what Pitch had expected him to be. When Skreeklavic had stormed into the Emporium a few years ago demanding some unnameable rum laced with the blood of an old fae colony (hence its illegality), he’d been loud and boorish and Pitch had barely had the mental capacity to deal with – let alone recognise – the infamous wolf. He’d just seemed too… normal, to _immature_ to be someone important enough of Pitch’s concern. He still did.

_Guess I missed the mark on that one_ , he thought as he cast his eyes back to the irritant wielding a bunch of cards with semi-naked werewolves painted on the backs.

Tanton slapped the tape (in no gentle fashion) to properly secure the cards on Clyde’s head. “Pick your favourite person here or we’ll pick a set of rules for you.”

_I still don’t understand what these two are saying_ , Pitch thought with a twitch of his eye.

A snicker from his right drew Pitch’s attention from the vague wolves, and his eyes flickered toward his nemesis of a frost spirit so comfortably reclined on the arm of his seat. The spirit’s blue gaze was watching the brawl between Skreeklavic and the fire spirit, a smirk carved into his face that was a little too vicious for a Guardian of Children.

And Pitch, for some damnable reason, found the expression intriguing of all things.

_But not as interesting as the hostility he’d been radiating after glassing the fire spirit._

He had only viewed the frost spirit’s expression through the reflection caught by the wall of glass in his line of view, but its potency had not been lost by the dark medium. It had been a look that spoke of the innumerable atrocities that would be inflicted upon anyone who so dared to pose even the simplest of queries to the frost spirit.

It had taken Pitch’s breath away.

_He would have made an incredible ally_ , his thoughts murmured on their own accord, reminding Pitch, not for the first time, of the annoying truth the Nightmare King was forever trying to deny for the sake of his own better health.

As he turned away from the frost spirit, out of the corner of his vision he saw Frost finally pull his attention away from the conflict to his right and peer at the wolves, who were impatiently (if their fidgeting was any indication) awaiting Pitch’s reply.

He opened his mouth to tell the two wolves exactly where they could shove their stupid cards (in a civil manner, of course, since he was a gentleman). But before he could utter a word, Frost shifted beside Pitch’s shoulder and asked, “What are you guys waiting for?”

“Pitch to make up his mind on whose hand he’s playing with,” Tanton said as he handed Frost his cards over the alcohol and plates scattered on the table.

Frost snorted as he settled back. “He’ll play with my rules, obviously. Otherwise you’ll set him up with a hand like Clyde’s since you’re a shifty asshole.”

Pitch turned and stared a hole straight through Frost, causing the latter to twitch slightly. “What else are you gonna do?” Frost grumbled at him, his eyes skirting over Pitch’s face briefly before flittering down to his cards. “Sit there and glare into your drink all night?”

“I was planning on it, yes,” Pitch muttered.

Frost rolled his eyes like the petulant, irritating, annoying, _interfering_ spirit he was and Pitch noticed the corner of his mouth quirk in amusement.

Feeling thoroughly harassed, Pitch turned back to the wolves in time to catch the secretive grin Tanton flashed at Frost. Clyde, meanwhile, was huffing angrily. “Hey! There’s nothing wrong with my rules. I’ll have you know that I’ve won for the last three years in a row.” He puffed out his chest proudly.

“That’s because I wasn’t here,” Frost sneered back.

Clyde’s eyes narrowed. “How confident are you feeling there, Snowflake?”

Frost went positivity rigid for a moment, and a small blossom of fear burst into life in his chest in the form of a decayed, furled lotus. Pitch glanced at him curiously, and watched as the bloom quickly withered and died as fast as it had appeared. “Confident enough that I’ll kick your ass,” Frost gritted out, fingers tightening fiercely on that staff of his.

Clyde laughed. “Don’t bet on it. You’ve been gone for a while. You should just quit now and let the masters show you how to really play.”

_Says the man with a pair of cards taped to his forehead_ , Pitch thought with a judgemental scoff. A breath of icy air passed just before Pitch’s face, and the Nightmare King wrinkled his nose at the sudden chill. He glanced at Frost and saw that the spirit had settled for simply raising a slender middle finger at the wolf.

“I ain’t no quitter,” Frost said.

“We’ll see about that, Snowball,” Clyde said with a leer. He went to pick up his bottle, to take a gulp of his drink and end their spat in style. But as soon as his fingers touched the surface of the glass, the werewolf leapt back with a yelp and the bottle clattered to the table.

It took Xani, Yanov, and Tanton exactly two seconds to figure out what had happened and begin laughing at Clyde’s expense. Pitch squinted at the brown bottle of alcohol and his eyes widened a little when he saw a fine white mist rolling off the surface and out of the mouth of the bottle. None of its contents had spilt either, despite its horizontal position.

Frost had frozen the thing solid with a single breath. Probably dropping the temperature so low that it burnt Clyde’s hand just to touch the glass. Pitch’s eyes slid to Frost and saw that he was looking around the room in complete innocence.

_Impressive_. _For a brat_.

Before Clyde could get up and fight Frost over his deceased drink – which would probably take forever and a day to defrost – Skreeklavic suddenly dropped his hold on the fire spirit, sending a grumbling Phoenix crashing to the floor.

“Alright you dogs, are we playing or not?” the werewolf boomed, accepting his cards from Yanov, who must have been keeping them safe while Skreeklavic harassed the fire spirit. Tanton yanked Clyde back down into his seat and fixed up the cards threatening to flop off Clyde’s forehead with a good slap that had the blond wincing.

Pitch watched with half a scowl as a hand of cards were forced into his possession and everyone seem to set themselves up for whatever game he had been dragged into. It didn’t take him long to realise the “rules” the wolves and Frost mentioned were unique to each player – everyone except Frost and Pitch, who had identical hands of three cards with two faced down on the table, were sporting utterly different playing methods.

It was a merciful realisation, in a sense, since Pitch’s dignity would implode if he had to stick anything – cards or otherwise – onto his face as Clyde seemed to do with pride.

Skreeklavic had at least seven cards on his person, with one face-up on the table. The fire spirit (once he had picked himself off the floor and kicked Skreeklavic’s fake leg) was sporting three cards, one facing himself, one the rest of the group, and the last face up on the table. Xani had all but one of her cards fanned beneath her glass, and as she refilled her drink to the brim, Tanton whipped three marbles out of a polished case and Yanov began to clear the table in front of him.

Although thankful that whatever bizarre set of rules Clyde was playing by was not the universal norm, Pitch’s forehead still pinched in confusion. “What is going on?” he muttered.

“It’s a bit hectic, but it works I swear,” Frost said with an excited flash of white teeth. “We once spent an entire Halloween sorting out everyone’s different rules to make sure it was all fair.”

“Blood flowed in rivers that night,” Tanton said wistfully.

He waved his cards at Frost, barely caring if he was meant to be keeping the contents of the cards a secret or not. “What do I do with these?”

Frost leapt at the opportunity to show Pitch the ropes, and as the frost spirit rattled off an assortment of rules and rituals he played by, the Nightmare King just stared at the spirit. He was waving his arms around energetically, but always made a point of keeping his cards turned in toward himself whenever he felt the prying eyes of one of the other players watching him too closely.

The rolled up sleeves of Pitch’s coat bunched around Frost’s forearms as he moved, the rest of the black material pooling around the spirit. The garment was downright enormous on the smaller spirit. Although the dark colour contrasted well with his pale features, he looked, on the whole, ridiculous.

_And yet so happy to receive it_ , Pitch thought, remembering how the powerfully hostile stance of the spirit had softened, almost melted, with Pitch’s gesture of…

…of what? Kindness? Aid? A gesture of selfishness to get everyone to shut up and the mood to settle already?

Pitch downed the drink he had been harbouring in order to stop the convulsive train of his thoughts. The liquid burned, spreading warmth down his throat, and he dropped the glass onto the table. Alcohol didn’t have quite the same effect on spirits empowered by otherworldly magic, which meant he couldn’t drown his sorrows to the point of no return, but Pitch could at least embrace the searing heat that spread through his ribcage and give his mind something else to latch onto rather than his ever-conflicting motives concerning Frost.

By the time Frost had finished the list of rules Pitch had most certainly only half been listening to, the Nightmare King had raised his brow in mild disbelief. “You came up with these rules yourself?”

Frost’s cheeks tinged the lightest purple and he scratched the back of his head. “Not quite. It’s an adaption of Yves’s rules – uh, the Halloween King’s, I mean. I just added a few things and made it a bit simpler.”

“Our Yves is one for dramatic flair,” Skreeklavic said warmly.

“A bit like you,” Frost said with a biting smile. Pitch returned the look, not even bothering to defend himself against an accusation he knew full well was quite true, and Frost added, “So I took out stupid parts, like where I’d have to pull a crow from my pocket to be able to win.”

As if both of them were on a similar wavelength, Pitch and Frost glanced down at the pockets of the black coat. Frost dug a hand into one of the deep pockets and his expression softened into a half-smile. “I’d probably be able to fit one in here.”

_The dead rebel I pulled that off would turn in his shallow grave if his coat became a tool for magic tricks_ , Pitch thought with an agreeable little hum.

“The same goes with Phoenix,” Clyde said, his elbows braced on his thighs, a new bottle swinging between his fingers.

Frost made a rude noise. “He just copied Skreek’s rules and dumbed it down for his tiny brain.”

Sharp teeth crunched down on a nut, and Phoenix shot Frost a mean smile. “Adaption is an art form, and one I am very skilled at, _dickhead_.”

_Irritating_ , growled Pitch’s thoughts.

“Tell that to the set of rules you butchered,” Skreeklavic commented, provoking the fire spirit into another series of rants.

_He’s so easy to rile up_ , Pitch thought with a hint of judgement. It was almost like watching a smaller, more human form of Bunymund, except without that suffocating waft of pride that always seemed to follow the Pooka.

“But first,” Frost said, plucking one of the three cards from his hand. “We donate one of these to someone else. Anyone else. Just throw it at them.”

Pitch shot him a confused look, before turning back to his cards and picking out one at random. As Frost did just as he recommended and tossed the card at Tanton – which the wolf caught with a deft snap of his fingers and a not-so-appreciative smile – Pitch swept a glance around the room while he refused to feel as out of his element as he truly was.

“Pitch,” Yanov said, holding out a large hand. “I’ll take it. I need more cards to win, anyway.”

Pitch handed over his card gratefully, and with a raucous hoot from Skreeklavic, the game commenced.

 

_This is absolute chaos._

Three rounds later, Pitch had somehow acquired eight more cards, lost one of his boots, and had barely escaped a standoff off with Skreeklavic when the werewolf had told him to take off his shirt. With the resolve in his mind to murder everyone in the room before they so much as caught an eyeful of his tattoos, Pitch had faced the werewolf down with one of his more potent stares until sweat had started to bead on the foreheads of both men. Xani had ended up intervening on his behalf, stating with a grimace that, “Clyde shirtless is enough to deal with, save my eyes and just let him take off a shoe or something”.

Although technically “lost”, Pitch was still keeping his boot safely wedged between his socked foot and his other shoe. They were his only pair of physical shoes, and he was _not_ prepared to deal with the Emporium’s scaled shoemaker (a lizard-like creature who’d tried to chew off Pitch’s leg when he’d asked to be sized up) ever again, let alone have to explain to the slithering fiend why he needed a new shoe, _singular_.

The vice he’d clamped around his boot tightened when he saw the hungry look Skreeklavic was sending the item of clothing, the werewolf radiating his twitching need to add Pitch’s shoe to the growing pile of conquered clothing he’d acquired around his feet.

Without even asking, Frost reached down and plucked one of the cards from Pitch’s hand, and shuffled it around into his own hand with a contented little smile. Pitch had half a mind to snark at the spirit some worthy comment about the fact that Frost could see all of Pitch’s cards from where he sat, and choosing one from his hand was more or less cheating.

But he tightened his jaw before the words could escape, the other half of his mind chiming in with a confused exclamation accusing him of being entirely too invested in a game so trivial and confusing.

Was he… enjoying himself?

The competitive energy that wafted off the skin of the wolves and spirits (even Xani, who Pitch had picked as a more sullen type, was ready to throw down in the name of game technicalities) was certainly doing something positive to Pitch’s overall gloom. He still felt utterly out of his element, especially when Frost and the wolves began screaming at each other over a particular manner of card playing.

But… the experience wasn’t entirely bad.

_I would still not call it enjoyment, though._

“Jack, boy,” Skreeklavic said as he pointed to the leather band around Tanton’s wrist, gesturing for him to give up it. “Since you plan on stealing me some Christmas cake, I suppose the rumours that you got turned into a Guardian have merit.”

Pitch tensed a little at the mention of his mortal enemies. A wary lash of darkness rose within him, and he prepared the pathetic little thing just in case he needed to smite someone in the defence of his own honour (or lack thereof).

Frost shot Pitch a nervous look. “Uh, yeah, I guess.”

“You guess?” Clyde said with a raised eyebrow as he scratched his bare chest. “Isn’t scoring a Guardian position meant to be a big deal in your world?”

Pitch’s guard faltered.

_“…in your world.”_

It was true that the domain the Moon had influence over on this planet was sometimes notably separated from the natural occurring magic of the earth, but a lot of the time magic was magic and it blurred and entwined. Sometimes one type built on one another, sometimes one cancelled the other out.

But not everyone lumped all types of magic together. Pitch had dealt with a lot of magical beings over his lifetime imprisoned on his planet, and every time he was reminded of his foreignness (which was more than often, considering the lack of tact most villains exercised), an awfully dark feeling flowed through his body. This time was no exception.

“I don’t even know why I got the job,” Frost admitted.

_You got it because you handed me my ass more than once_ , Pitch answered silently.

Skreeklavic scratched at the side of his head. “Well I suppose you are good with kids. Never really imagined you as the teamwork type, though. Especially with those bigwigs. Remember when we used to poke fun at them, Jack? I suppose we can’t do that anymore.” The giant werewolf sniffed. “Guh, why couldn’t you have just taken up a career in evil like your mother and I wanted for you?”

Frost chuckled at Skreeklavic’s absurdity, but there was something a little off about that laugh, a little tight. Pitch assumed it was because he was there, the incarnation of evil in the Moon’s world, sitting right next to Frost while the latter got reprimanded for not joining the dark side when he had the chance.

“Because someone decided to intervene for once,” Phoenix uttered, venom slashing through his tone in a manner that drew an odd look from Pitch. The fire spirit flinched when he realised whose attention he’d managed to snag.

Was he talking about Pitch in such a hostile manner? Or…or was he talking about the Moon?

Frost looked over and caught the fire spirit’s eyes. They exchanged something, something silent and private, before Frost turned back to Skreeklavic and Phoenix drew a thick black cigar-looking stick from his pant pocket.

“The job comes with free dental. And company transport.” He groaned suddenly. “Too much company transport. North keeps throwing me through his fucking snow globes and – ugh, you know what? Swap with me Skreek. You look like you could use the dental more than me, anyway.”

Pitch nearly smirked at the sound of Frost’s complaint. He was having a hard time with those swirling vortex portals? Good. _Serves him right for joining those do-gooders in the first place_.

The werewolf scoffed. “My dental hygiene is impeccable, boy. Besides, if I left my pack, I’d have no other choice but to leave Phoenix in charge. How could I do that to my wolves?”

Phoenix protested the insult as he lit his smoke with a flame flickering between two of his fingers. Ignoring him, Frost and Skreeklavic grimaced at each other in agreement. “You could always give Yves your job,” Frost suggested.

“Oh hell no,” Clyde exploded, pointing at the two conspiring men. “You are not leaving us with the clean freak, boss. We think he’s great but we can _not_ deal with him all year around.”

Surprisingly, Xani agreed with a blunt, “Have you even seen the state the fortress is in? He’d make us scrub every stone wall because he can’t help it.”

Tanton looked distressed. “We have four hundred rooms in that place, boss. Please have mercy.”

Skreeklavic gave Frost a wide grin. “You heard the wolves, Jack. No heroic work for me. You might be able to get Pitch to help you out though.”

Frost and Pitch went positively rigid at the casual comment, and Frost flashed Skreeklavic a warning look that made even Pitch’s body temperature drop.

_Once again proving that villains lack all tact._

The werewolf grinned wickedly. “What do you say, Pitch? Does the job of a Guardian sound appealing at all?”

“Decidedly not,” he said briskly.

The grin darkened. “Not even for the Christmas cake?”

There was a pause. Pitch glanced warily at the werewolf, wondering about the sudden change in his expression. The other wolves, Pitch noticed with a suspicious scowl, looked amused, almost. Or at least trying to hide their amusement. Phoenix had tuned out of the conversation altogether and was smoking in silence, and Frost, strangely enough, had relaxed his tense stance somewhat.

“Are you not a cake man, Pitch?”

Pitch’s forehead creased deeply. He had a feeling that if he replied with a no, Skreeklavic’s next move would be to banish him from the house altogether in honour of the cake he so trespassed against and Pitch’s own (lacking) manhood.

“Hey, Pitch, can you hold my cards for a sec?”

_Can I – wait what?_

Without waiting for an answer, Frost forcibly placed his neat pile of cards in Pitch’s only free hand. Pitch gave the spirit a withering look, but Frost simply slid off the arm of the chair and held out a finger to him. “Just one second, I promise.”

And then proceeded to skip off toward the fire spirit.

Pitch stared dumbly at the cards in his hands. _He just… left me_.

He looked up and saw, with a cringe, that Skreeklavic was still awaiting his answer about the cake matter. The Nightmare King barely held back the annoyed growl that reverberated in his chest.

“Well, Pitch? Cake or no cake?”

To hell with any pleasant thoughts he might have been harbouring about this evening.

He was going to _murder_ Frost.

 

* * *

 

 

Jack hid his smile in the collar of Pitch’s coat as he hurried away from the Nightmare King. Much to his dismay, the material had cooled since Jack had slung it over his shoulders, but surprisingly enough Pitch’s scent had an almost warm quality to it itself. Iron and heat and an indescribable scent that was Pitch’s own lingered in the material, and every so often Jack found his nose and cheek brushing against the soft fabric.

It almost made him feel guilty for abandoning the guy.

But Skreek had given him the eye, the _knowing_ eye, and Jack had realised in an instant that whatever pleasantries Skreek had exchanged with Pitch up to this point had been merely to flesh out the Nightmare King, to probe at his receptiveness.

And now Skreek was unleashing his full, evil, rottenness on poor Pitch and Jack definitely didn’t want to get caught in the crosshairs of that conversation.

_Poor Pitch?_ his thoughts laughed.

“Anyone deserves sympathy when Skreek starts clawing them open,” Jack muttered under his breath.

Phoenix was staring up at the chandelier as Jack casually leaned on the back of his wooden chair. The fire spirit blinked at the lights, frowning, and when Jack asked what he was looking at, Phoenix tilted his head forward with a huff and asked instead, “Just what do you think you’re doing, Frost?”

Jack raised his eyebrow at the deflection, but, unperturbed, took the chance he had to evaluate the other man’s cards. “You’ve been holding this piece of crap hand this whole time? And with such a straight face, too. Wow, Phoenix, I should give you more credit.”

“No one asked for your dirty cheating opinion.”

Jack’s eyes scanned down briefly, and he saw a bright, inflamed scar in between the short hairs on the left side of Phoenix’s head. “You cauterized that cut?”

“Had to. There was so much blood that when I went downstairs four vampires dropped to their knees and tried to serenade me. I had to flame up just so they wouldn’t follow me into the broom closet, the creepers. Now tell me what you want already.”

Jack laughed, the ridiculous mental image of Phoenix warding off a bunch of hungry vampires with a handful of fire and a fist full of cleaning supplies bringing a spark of joy to his cold heart. “Some of your smoke,” he eventually replied.

Tipping his head back, Phoenix’s lip quirked at the quiet request, and he wiggled the blunt between his teeth with his tongue. “Hard day at work, honey?”

“Something like that,” Jack said as he watched Phoenix draw in a mouthful of whatever coloured drug the fire spirit had gotten his hot hands on. “Urie and Grey tried to smoke me out earlier.”

Phoenix frowned. He pulled the blunt from his lips and Jack opened his mouth an inch away from his, freezing nose barely brushing a stubbly, too-hot chin. Navy mist poured out of Phoenix’s mouth on a controlled exhale, and the warm smoke curled over Jack’s lips. The taste of tinkling water dripping into an oasis, refreshing and cooling, laved over his tongue, accompanied by the occasional hint of ash (from Phoenix’s own breath, probably). He closed his eyes and pulled away from Phoenix, feeling the gentle smoke cool in his lungs until he couldn’t feel it at all.

It wasn’t nearly as strong as the old stuff they used to get centuries ago, a smoke so black it could hold its own against Pitch’s shadows in both viscosity and sentience, but it was pleasant. Soothing. It had such a calming effect that Jack was only slightly annoyed by the various hollered comments the other wolves were throwing at his and Phoenix’s expense.

He felt nice. And wasn’t the least bit surprised that Phoenix, with his rough temper, was inhaling the drug equivalent of water mediation.

“Did you beat their dead faces in? Please tell me there was blood. Urie’s blood, preferably.”

Jack snorted at Phoenix’s less-than-tranquil plea for gore _._ He opened his eyes as he blew barely-blue smoke from his nostrils. “Skreek handled them for me.”

The werewolf lit up at the sound of his good deed, pulling himself away from the lecture he was giving Pitch on the importance of baked goods. “I was very heroic, wasn’t I, Jack?”

Jack grinned indulgently as he rested his elbows on Phoenix’s chair. “Swear to god, you nearly had me swooning, Skreek.”

Skreek dusted something, probably his ever-accumulating bullshit, from his shoulder. Then he re-grasped Pitch’s attention by screaming the name of a desert Yves always loved to make, and continued his rant. Phoenix rolled his eyes and probed Jack with the hand holding his blunt. “The fuck did they want?”

Before Jack could answer, he heard Skreek make a distinctly sketchy comment concerning Jack that sounded awfully – _embarrassingly_ – like a father investigating the worthiness of a potential date.

_I_ knew _he’d pull some shit like this._

Jack growled his displeasure at Skreek, and, to his dismay, was promptly dismissed by the werewolf with a careless wave. None of the others bothered to even try and defend him.

And then Skreek went right ahead and asked Pitch how he’d come to meet Jack, and the frost spirit watched, horrified, as every delicate conversation topic that could have possibly existed in this situation was steamrolled over by the werewolf.

Jack’s fingers tightened around his staff, ready, for the sake of diplomacy, to ice Skreek and put an end to whatever he was trying to extract from Pitch.

_Or should I just do what I considered earlier and rain down a blizzard on these bastard’s heads?_

Yes, a blizzard would work. Yves’s wouldn’t mind the water stains… probably.

“I tried to destroy the world.”

Jack’s arm went limp with shock, his staff hitting Phoenix’s chair. He was going along with it. Pitch was actually…

The spirit flinched when Pitch’s head tilted toward him. “He tried to stop me.”

He’d given Skreek an actual answer.

_I just wish it had been a different one_ , Jack thought as a nauseous wave of sorrow washed, briefly, through his organs. He could feel Phoenix’s eyes burning holes in the side of his face, and Jack pointedly ignored them.

Skreek reprimanded Jack for being a “goody-two-shoes” with a grin that did a terrible job of hiding a mound of wickedness so colossal it would tower over the huge mountains at the very edges of Yves’s realm. Jack choked, coughing on his own indignation over having being chastised for _saving the entire world_ , and huffed, sending deadly looks to both the werewolf and the king.

“Frost,” Phoenix pressed, annoyed that he was being ignored.

“Smoke first,” Jack bargained, removing his eyes from the bonding moment firing up between the villains to his left.

“You know this shit ain’t gonna get you hazed, right?”

“I know. But it makes me feel like rethinking the direction my life has taken. Maybe I should relax some more, become one with nature. I’m on the verge of enlightenment.”

“You already sleep outside like a hobo. How much more nature do you want?”

Jack just gave him a dry look, to which Phoenix replied with a “yeah, yeah” roll of his eyes. With one last drag, he surrendered the blunt to Jack, holding the dark coil of paper above his head as he was bombarded with game-related requests (and a few rude comments) from the wolves.

Jack took the blunt and cast a glance back to Skreek and Pitch in time to catch the smallest of smiles curl the corner of Pitch’s mouth.

_Fuck_.

It was such a genuine smile that his eyes lacked most of their usual sharpness, the grey softening and the gold brightening and Jack felt something painful curl around the breath in his chest.

With shaking fingers, he tore his eyes from Pitch and inhaled, deeply, trying to loosen the ties threading through and knotting in his lungs.

Jack knew he’d been curious about Pitch’s range of expressions, but that…

_…was the face he made after being complimented for being an evil son of a bitch. Pull yourself together._

He twitched in annoyance.

Letting the gentlest of trickling water _drip drip_ onto his tongue like falling rain (in taste, anyway), Jack watched as Phoenix masterfully hustled Clyde and Yanov out of their socks and made them donate their clothes to the (small) pile around his feet.

But soon a familiarly uncomfortable sensation was crawling down his spine, little fingers tapping on his vertebrae. He thought it was the drug, for a moment, but then curiosity had Jack looking over his shoulder.

At the sight of a small, white, _familiar_ face, he grew incredibly still.

Head poking up at the very bottom corner of the wall of windows, the creature he’d left on the beach just watched him with those dead absorbing eyes. The dark smile split its face, revealing its tiny pearly fangs – fang so sharp Jack swore he could see the air bleed around them.

How the _fuck_ had it followed him into this realm? Yves’s wards – they were as powerful as living hell, impenetrable, in fact, on Halloween. And worse yet, how on earth had it gotten up to the second story? There wasn’t even an eve outside for it to be standing on!

As rich panic began to bubble in Jack, two glowing lights curled into life in the pit of the creature’s black eyes. Alarm shot through Jack, but before he could look away, his stomach dropped and his vision was filled with white.

_“Jack! Help us, Jack.”_

_A giggle. Laughter, playful laughter. A ball was kicked toward him. Soft leaves curled between his toes._

_“Fucking hell, Frost.” A puff of hot air hit him in the face, drawing him from the feel of the leaves at his feet. A ball was shoved into his chest. “Pull yourself together.”_

_Tiny voices called him again. “Please help us.”_

_The ball spun between his fingers, frosting over at his touch, and the voices all shouted in glee as he defected to the enemy team._

“Oi, Frost. You listening to me?”

Jack turned back to Phoenix, and through the bundling mess turning his head into a churning pit of leaves he had no memory of ever walking on and voices he had never heard before and _blood_ , his blood, their blood, the air’s blood, threading around him threatening to slice into his skin, he realised that the fire spirit was looking at him with so much concern. Jack wished he’d stop looking at him, wished Phoenix would let his eyes rove to Jack’s right and see the thing _that just wouldn’t leave him alone_ in the corner of the window. He wished Phoenix would turn back to him and tell him, _tell him_ that whatever the spirit was doing was wrong, that he had never kicked a ball with Jack in a forest accompanied by children Jack had no memory of. That Jack hadn’t forgotten something he had a terrible feeling was very, very important.

The frost spirit glanced back over and with a shudder noted that the creature was still standing there. Staring.

“You okay?” Phoenix asked softly.

Forcing himself to nod, Jack took a deep inhale of the blue smoke and tried to circulate the stuff up to his poor brain. He breathed, and he worked to claw the laughing voices and squirming blood out of his head.

“Urie and Grey wanted to know why I was here,” he said, hoping, weakly, that if he ignored the little creature it would leave him alone until the end of Halloween. The very idea of it wandering around outside in a realm it should never have been able to break into in the first place freaked Jack out no end, not to mention the fact that Yves’s family would be arriving soon, and if the creature was caught in Yves’s fields…

Unless, of course, it was a creature _from_ _Yves’s_ _fields_. Maybe Jack was just being too paranoid, maybe – _maybe_ – the creature wasn’t as mysterious and creepy as he had given it credit for and it was actually just working under Yves’s guidance.

_Would he seriously send that thing all the way to the_ North Pole _to_ steal North’s swords _?_

Jack sighed as his hopeful notion slipped, defeated, out of the Great and Relieving Ideas Zone, and went off to sulk somewhere with his mental health. 

Phoenix’s expression, meanwhile, was darkening on other matters. “You mean –”

“Not just tonight. They meant hiding out here in general.”

His lip curled in anger. “They’ve never cared about that before.”

“I know,” Jack said quietly.

“I am going to show those twins a very, very bad time one day. And I’m gonna fucking enjoy it.” He flashed Jack a smile. “I’ll even let you throw one or two of your shitty punches.”

_So thoughtful_ , Jack thought with a small smile. Then the smile dropped, little by little, and Jack tentatively looked back over his shoulder again to see if the creature had grown bored yet.

He sagged in relief when he saw that the face was gone.

Phoenix groaned. “Ugh, can you tell your boyfriend to stop glaring at me? You know he pisses me off.”

Surprised, Jack’s gaze snapped over to Pitch and saw that, indeed, the Nightmare King was appraising the two of them with narrowed eyes. Was he disgusted by their PD- well, not affection, but closeness? Was he judging their recreational drug use? The fact that Jack was meant to be a protector of children and yet was enjoying the hell out of the magic smoke probably dying his sinuses an unhealthy blue?

_You are literally a role model of what a Guardian shouldn’t be._

A stab of pain shot straight through his heart at the snide thought, the words hitting a painful nerve. But they weren’t new words. They were not crippling. He had known, even before his thoughts had started informing him outright of his inadequacy, of the gaping holes in his résumé, of the bad habits he’d picked up from worse people.

_Way to burst my little bubble of harmony. Although the spirit did a pretty good job of that already._

Taking a last, deep breath, Jack leaned down to Phoenix’s ear and murmured, “That’s only because you’re scared to death of him.”

The fire spirit cut him a glare as blue smoke curled around the two faces, and Jack pressed the blunt back into his fingers. With any luck the blue smoke would bring Phoenix so much tranquillity he’d melt onto the floor and Jack could relieve his hand of that pretty ace by his index finger.

“And he’s not my boyfriend,” he thought to add as he straightened up.

“Regardless, you’re making a shit decision, Frost,” Phoenix muttered behind his back as Jack returned to his own seat.

Without pausing, without turning, without even checking to see if Phoenix had actually intended on him hearing that remark or not, Jack’s eyes roved quickly over the Nightmare King rigidly holding two sets of cards and breathed a self-depreciating, “You’re telling me.”

 


	8. This is Halloween (Part III)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Pitch's social torture is continued, the gang witnesses the King's family dinner, and the Nightmare King deals with his annoying emotions in a manner befitting the bastard that he is.

As Frost abandoned his post as Pitch’s (makeshift) flesh shield, and Skreeklavic began to delve into the qualities of a good butter cake, Pitch’s pride, an upstanding secretary of public relations, dutifully informed him that he was being mocked.

And it didn’t like it one bit.

The looming, convulsing entity begged him, licking dried lips, to just blind everyone in the room and double them all over with fear. He probably had enough power to do it, what with the bits and pieces of panic shooting off the fire spirit whenever Pitch so much as glanced in his direction.

His pride and his bloodlust and his dignity, it was as if they all sat on a committee in Pitch’s chest and decided, at times unanimously, when vengeance should be reaped.

And when they combined their efforts… it was painful.

Out of the corner of his vision, Pitch saw darkness begin to cluster in the corners of the room, the shadows behind tables and speared from the chandelier wavering and growing.

The fireplace shifted its enormous stones, almost warily so, and Pitch angrily told the darkness to calm the fuck down.

It did… but just barely. As if it had the audacity to try and get in the last word.

Which irked Pitch more than Skreeklavic ranting about his conspiracy theory concerning non-baked cheesecakes ever could.

Xani requested yet another of his cards, and as Pitch rearranged all the damn pieces in his hands and held them out to her, she just watched him with an intense look.

_She saw the shadows moving, didn’t she?_

Pitch stared back, daring her to so much as mention his lack of control over his own court, but she did no such thing. Moving that intense look from Pitch to the cards, she took a moment to decide which one she should pick, during which time the shadows in the room finally settled down enough to just stay still.

Turning his head back to Skreeklavic when his attention was summoned, Pitch tilted the hand containing Frost’s fanned cards so Xani would be able to get a good long look at the stupid frost spirit’s cards. He was going to strangle the spirit when he returned anyway, so having a disadvantaged hand would be the least of his worries.

Xani made a cunning noise when she noticed what Pitch was doing, and he felt a card deftly leave Frost’s collection.

“You’re a keeper, Pitch.”

Pitch choked on the unnecessary compliment, and gave the wolf a startled look. Xani simply smirked back at him, probably in a grateful manner, Pitch really couldn’t tell, and began drinking again to get to her deck and match up her cards.

His board of impulses grumbled crabbily.

“– rivers actually flowed in custard the world would be a better place. Don’t you agree, Pitch?”

The Nightmare King sighed, beyond pained. “I do not make a habit of eating human food,” he told the werewolf. “So I wouldn’t know.”

_Not that anything would be able to improve this wretchedly miserable –_

Skreeklavic stomped his metal foot angrily. “What is it with you Moon-magic sad sacks? I swear, you and Jack make me hungry just looking at the pair of you. The next time I see you on the street, Pitch, so help you I’m going to –”

As if prompted by the mention of the spirit’s name, Pitch’s eyes slid, involuntarily, over to the idiot who had left Pitch to mind his cards, and a muscle beneath his eye twitched violently as the spirit stood on his toes and leaned down to –

“– and you’ll be so overwhelmed by just how amazing, not only her hair is, but the divine creation that is – ”

Sheer, bitter confusion pinched at his senses.

The more Frost and Phoenix interacted, the less Pitch understood about either of them. One minute they were hurling insults and fire balls at each other, fighting seriously enough that Pitch had seen the fear of pain, the genuine fear of each other in both of their chests, and then next they were as close as lovers. Pitch ordered two cards from Yanov and watched as dark smoke curled up between two mouths separated by a mere inch.

“– thank me for all the wondrous creations I would have shown you, and you’ll turn your back on whatever terrible, _infernal_ diet you and Jack are on and embrace the evil, wicked, _tantalizing_ goodness of – ”

As Skreeklavic _still_ continued talking (when did the beast even make time to breathe in those sentences?), Tanton and Clyde began hooting at the two spirits. Pitch tore his eyes away from the intimate display, but not before he caught Frost rock back on his bare heels and let his eyes fall shut, savouring whatever he has just inhaled. His Adam’s apple dropped, the lump running under taut skin that was so pale it couldn’t hide the too-dark veins running in long lattices just under its surface. Now that he was standing, the long folds of Pitch’s coat hung in slick lines down Frost’s back, dropping from slim shoulders and stopping at the back of his heels.

_I once fought with the full intention to kill that spirit. Why on this damned earth am I admiring my coat on him?_

And why, by his hellish existence, was he considering that maybe his coat didn’t look so silly on Frost after all?

Pitch dropped one of the sets of cards, he didn’t care which, and pinched the bridge of his nose in frustration.

“MUSTIKKAPIIRAKKA.”

He jolted, surprised and wary and damned _confused_ at Skreeklavic’s sudden outburst. Why was he yelling about a blueberry pie at him?

Then Skreeklavic began to laugh in earnest, and Pitch felt like kicking him in his (real) shin. “I’m just messing around, Pitch. Except the part where I find you and force a hearty meal down your throat. That bit wasn’t a joke.” The werewolf leaned forward, one elbow on a large thigh, and said in a low voice, “Gotta sus you out to make sure you ain’t here to hurt our Jack.”

Pitch stiffened, sliding a semi-disbelieving look to Skreeklavic. This wolf enjoyed putting him on edge, didn’t he? What an absolute bastard.

…but, well, in this situation it was probably understandable – if Skreeklavic’s concern was genuine.

Frost bristled like a watered cat and hissed, “I’m not your anything you dirty old wolf.”

Skreeklavic waved the frost spirit off with a large hand. “Shut your trap, Jack. Can’t you see Pitch and I are trying to have an adult conversation over here? So, Pitch, how’d you end up with this scrawny runt?”

Pitch hesitated. If these wolves knew who he was, knew who the Guardians were, there was a good chance that they knew what Pitch had nearly done ten years ago.

But also…

_Damnit_.

Pitch hated to admit it, but in reality he had little right to get worked up over whatever questions were thrown at him. Especially considering that Frost didn’t realise, but he was doing Pitch a decent favour by so naïvely throwing the past into whatever box he could find and replacing the lid for now. Before Frost had invited him to stay, Pitch had been readying himself for two nights of hiding, pathetically, from his prowling Nightmares.

_The truth it is_ , he thought, telling his irritation to scram.

“I tried to destroy the world,” he bluntly stated, and cocked his chin in Frost’s direction, “he tried to stop me.”

Even though “eventually succeeded in stopping” would have been more accurate, since the world was (unfortunately) still in one piece, Pitch let the others fill in the blanks without vocally sacrificing his dignity.

Skreeklavic gave Frost a dry look. “There’s nothing to gain by being a goody-two-shoes, Jack.”

Frost spluttered, sending a glare to the wolf and to Pitch, before crossing his arms and pouting.

Skreeklavic chuckled and gave Pitch an appraising look. “I’ve heard some wicked stories from your exploits, Pitch. Downright dastardly. Makes my heart sing.”

Rolling his marbles over his knuckles, Tanton added, “He tells the pups about the time you took out half of Africa with a cannibal spirit to scare the wits out of them before they go to sleep.”

Pitch couldn’t hide the small, pleased smile on his face. His alliance with Kikiyaon hadn’t been an easy one to forge, and to this day, Pitch was still trying to convince himself that the effort had been worth it in the end. That the aid of the cannibal and his horde of vulture-owls had been invaluable to Pitch’s reign of terror. That the greeting cards the cannibal’s wife (a woman even Pitch considered questionable enough to avoid) still sent him every New Year didn’t annoy the Nightmare King half to death.

But hearing that Skreeklavic, the leader of the Werewolfian Hordes, thought Pitch Black was worthy enough to frighten his own brethren?

It quietly pleased Pitch no end.

Yanov demanded, in a tone that was downright murderous, one of the cards Pitch had stolen from the masterpiece he was building – on principle alone, Pitch knew, since Yanov could take any card he pleased and didn’t necessarily _need_ the very ones Pitch had taken. Pitch surrendered the card with a cruel, knowing smirk. Yanov snatched it out of his hand, and Tanton laughed at Yanov’s attitude as he readied his marbles for his own turn.

A jolt of fear burst into the corner of Pitch’s senses.

Startled, though he’d never admit it, Pitch looked at the frost spirit standing behind Phoenix and his eyes widened a little when he saw the spirit’s fear. Fear, bordering on terror, that most definitely hadn’t been there a moment ago.

Rotating, melting, curling in his chest, cut and broken glass was grating, the sharp pieces drawing blood out of clear surfaces – blood that cascaded down the glass and dripped like melted ice. Pitch could taste the icy water, the copper, the dustings of glass cutting tiny holes in his tongue. Then the minuscule cuts began to burn, the glass catching alight and pouring a fire that was both hot and cold through his muscles and down his throat.

Pitch bit down hard on his tongue, the real pain slicing through his extra sense and momentarily making the burn disappear. He looked at Frost, properly, this time, not just the bleeding, burning glass that was folding in on itself in his ribcage, and saw that his neck was turned, muscles strained, as his gaze focused on the large wall of windows off to his far right. His arm, and the smoke at the tip of his fingers, hung lip at his side.

Pitch followed his stare, and his eyes narrowed in surprise when he saw Frost’s weird little spirit in the bottom corner of the window.

His gaze flickered back to Frost as the glass began to melt and pool, began to crystallise into red and white snow, and the fear began to lick high in the spirit’s throat.

_What is it doing to him?_

Disturbed, not only by the spirit, but by the strangeness of Frost’s fear, Pitch didn’t even realise he had stopped breathing until Phoenix reclaimed Frost’s attention and the fear began to evaporate.

Allowing his lungs to deflate, with a deft slide of his eyes, he found the small grinning face in the window, and Pitch shot it a solid, unbroken glare. He still had no idea what the little freak was. And even more importantly, he didn’t understand why it was completely immune to the fear he could manifest. Everything had fear, everything knew some form of fear, and if it didn’t, Pitch could always plant a seed, sow a line of them, and destroy even the steadfast of minds.

But that creature? It hadn’t given him the space to plant a seed when Pitch had tried. As if… as if it was empty.

Its very existence put Pitch on edge.

After a quick glance from Frost (causing a brief spike in his fear), the black grin began to sink out of sight, and Pitch watched as the creature disappeared from the second-story window.

“Freak,” Pitch muttered, before turning back to the wolves and remembering, somehow, that he should be continuing the conversation.

_It’s been so long since I’ve had to do this. Usually I just glare at anyone who tries to make small talk in the Emporium._

“I’ve heard about your wars as well,” Pitch finally said, returning Skreeklavic’s compliment. “You spread a lot of fear wherever you go, it’s refreshing.”

As Skreeklavic began to laugh, pleased at the praise, Pitch found himself frowning over at Frost. He wanted the spirit to walk his ass back so he could ask him how the weirdo creature had gotten into the realm, how it managed to cause so much terror without being able to host any itself.

He wanted to know what in the ever-loving darkness it was meant to be.

_I also want to maim you so very badly for leaving me at Skreeklavic’s mercy, so hurry the fuck up, Frost._

Pitch’s focus narrowed when he noticed the spikes of alarm poking through the bare skin of Phoenix’s shoulders in the form of tiny black needles. The fire spirit’s fear (the fear _of_ Pitch) tasted like darkness, like cold and the bitter iron of shadows with flashes of honeyed gold.

It was his preferred flavour of fear, especially when most of the time he was copping mouthfuls of acidic rot, and the occasional painful burst of sensation and flavour like he’d just been getting from Frost a few moments ago.

He savoured the taste, if only for a moment, before turning back to Skreeklavic as the werewolf spoke.

“Can’t take all the credit for that one, Boogeyman. It helps when my wolves are just as terrifying as I am.”

Pitch glanced around and saw that his wolves were looking at their boss with clear pride in their eyes.

_Pride. Pride in his army, his army’s pride in him._

Pitch hadn’t felt that in a very long time.

“Stop glaring at Phoenix, you’re freaking him out.”

The Nightmare King turned a deliberate look onto Frost as he finally retook his seat on the arm of the chair. “I know,” he said simply.

Frost sniggered at Pitch’s answer, and reclaimed his cards. Not a moment later, though, the amusement was gone from his face, and he exclaimed, “Hey, where’s my nine?”

Xani chuckled darkly.

While Frost glared at the wolf over Pitch’s head, the Nightmare King scanned his face for any sign that he was still unsettled over whatever had happened with the ghostly creature.

_His eyes look a bit hunted, but that’s about it._

Dropping his voice low, Pitch murmured, “How did that thing follow us?”

Frost jumped. “You saw it too?” he whispered worriedly.

“Yes.” _Along with whatever it was doing to you._

Frost sighed and his eyes roved the windows. “I have no idea how it got through the wards. I mean, you said it yourself that they’re hella strong.”

Not the exact phrase he had used, but accurate enough. The wards around this realm were so dense and defensive that Pitch himself had nearly passed out along with Frost when they’d finally been allowed through.

Anxiety suddenly knitted Frost’s brow. “Please don’t tell Yves. He’ll get mad if he found out something broke into his realm.”

Pitch blinked. “I have no intentions on doing anything of the kind.”

Frost offered him a grateful smile, his expression softening in relief, and Pitch averted his eyes from the spirit.

During their quiet exchange, of which none of the others had been paying attention to, thankfully, Skreeklavic’s joyous laughter had waned into something less happy. “If only the damned piglet spirits on my property would be as scared of me,” he grumbled.

Pitch grimaced. “I’ve heard they can be hard to handle.”

“Hard? More like impossible! My wolves are scared shitless of the damned things, and the one time we were able to eradicate a sty of them, it turned out there were more nested in my roof! The roof, Pitch. It was abominable. I’m still trying to get the blasted squealers out of my downpipes.”

“What’s so bad about little baby piglet spirits?” Frost asked, frowning at Skreeklavic as if he was scolding him for being mean to tiny animals.

Pitch smirked a little, and thought about the countless baby animal spirits who’d sooner see a person dead than curl up at their feet. “If they run between your legs they kill you.”

Frost blinked down at him in shock, and whispered, “Seriously?” He looked horrified.

_This expression I can handle_ , Pitch thought as his smirk grew and he nodded.

“Have you dealt with them before?”

Pitch’s eyes returned to Skreeklavic. “I had to protect a nest of them from a rabid kitsune once.” In the name of an evil alliance, of course.

_The things I do just to see this world crumble._

Tanton made a face at him. “That sounds like it would have sucked.”

“How did you stop them from killing you?” Yanov asked, apparently having forgiven Pitch for the time being. “We’ve been tying together the shoelaces of the pups just so the piglets don’t get an opening.”

Pitch shrugged. “They seemed to have known help when they saw it,” he said unhelpfully. “I never had a real problem with them.”

Then Frost giggled, a deep little laugh that drew the eyes of everyone in the room, and the spirit quickly hid his laughter behind his hand.

“You find our pain amusing, huh, Jack?” Skreeklavic accused.

Frost shook his head quickly. “I’m not laughing at you guys, promise. And if you need help getting them out of your plumbing, Phoenix and I can probably flush them out for you.”

Phoenix lit his fist on fire and said, “What he said, minus the probably.”

Suspicion replaced with a touched look, Skreeklavic slapped Phoenix on the back, causing the flame to splutter out, and began to wail about how nice it was that _some people_ (with a pointed look at his wolves, who all rolled their eyes) weren’t afraid of tiny ghosts.

Frost bit his lip, then glanced down at Pitch. In a quiet voice, he said, “The mental image of you splashing around in a muddy pen of newborn piglets is incredible.”

_So that’s what he had been laughing at,_ Pitch thought as dark feeling began to well from the depths of his insides. It was probably his dignity preparing its weapon of mass destruction, egged on by all of Pitch’s other impulses. He could feel them all begging for blood and the demise of the grinning spirit sitting so close that Pitch could feel the chill from Frost’s arm permeating his shoulder.

“Did you even get to wear rubber boots?”

He was definitely going to murder this kid.

Pitch’s turn came around again, and he was about to ask Yanov for another slice of his sculpture (the werewolf had returned to glaring at him, daring Pitch to make his cruel move) when Frost put a hand in front of his face to stop him. Pitch raised a semi-menacing scowl to Frost, but the look was wiped clean when he saw the evil smile that graced the frost spirit’s face.

_Why did the Guardians have to get him before I did?_ he thought bitterly.

“I got this,” Frost muttered wickedly. Turning to Skreeklavic he said, “I want the card you have on your far right.” With a grumble, Skreeklavic extracted said card, and just as he’d handed it over, Frost added, “And the one you have hiding in the middle by your thumb for Pitch.”

Skreeklavic glared at Pitch as if the Nightmare King had asked for the card himself, and with an angry toss, relinquished whatever gem he’d been trying to bury in his hand.

_The brat has a good eye,_ Pitch thought as he rearranged the cards in his hand to accommodate his new prize. _And a surprisingly good sense for cheating_ , he added when he realised that Frost must have caught sight of the cards while he was off being chummy with the fire spirit.

Skreeklavic, mercifully, was unable to best Tanton at his little marble trick, and was forced to relinquish an article of the wolf’s clothing.

While Skreeklavic grumbled about Tanton’s fraudulent rules, the fire spirit looked Frost dead in the face and said, “I want your underwear.”

Pitch’s non-existent eyebrow twitched, bemused, until he remembered that Phoenix’s brand of whatever this game was involved stripping as well – just like Skreeklavic’s.

Frost instantly coloured a mottled shade of purple and exclaimed, “What the hell do you want with my underwear?! You’re a disgusting bastard and I don’t wear any.”

The last bit was mumbled quickly, but not quick enough. Pitch smirked at the information, Xani began drinking again, and Phoenix sneered. “How about that coat you’ve got on? Looks pretty swank.”

Pitch stiffened at the indirect threat, but the instant he’d gone to give Frost a look of warning, and maybe even snatch his precious coat back off the spirit to keep it safe, the frost spirit growled a very serious, “Fuck off.”

Pitch was stunned. The words reverberated straight through his body, humming along tendons and veins like the low rumble of a war drum, and some sort of emotion in his chest cavity convulsed painfully. Phoenix’s sneer fell off his face, replaced by a serious stare, and Pitch met him glare-for-glare when he had the balls to glance over at the Nightmare King

His courage petered out quickly, though, and soon his eyes were back on Frost and his irritating expression normalised. “Then I’ll take the card you nicked from Skreek.”

With a few mumbled curses – very creative curses, Pitch noticed with a hidden smile – Frost took one of the cards from his hand and went to pass it over to Phoenix.

The fire spirit didn’t move to take the card, and just stared at Frost with a shit-eating smirk. “You’re an asshole and that’s not the one.”

Sighing, Frost went to pick out the proper card from his hand when all the lights in the room flickered once, their shadows growing monstrous before reforming into their slender slithers.

Small flares of fear burst into the chests of Frost and Phoenix and both of them seemed to forget about the card they were fighting over.

Then the lights were extinguished altogether.

Illuminated only by the flickering sprites in the fireplace, Pitch glanced around at the wolves and spirits and noted that none of them seemed surprised over the lack of light. Did the king usually cut the power during Halloween gatherings? Was it some sort of energy saving scheme?

The wall around the fireplace began to tremble, and Pitch felt Frost flinch when thick, matted vines burst through broken seams between the stones. The vines extended and knotted until they formed a protective barrier around the fire sprites, and the weave tightened until nothing but the tiniest flickers of light could escape into the room.

Pitch took note of the rattling, smoking fear in Frost’s chest, and after a brief reconnaissance with his sixth sense, he noticed that everyone downstairs had a trace of fear running through them as well. It hovered over the entire downstairs as a dark cloud dropping tentacles speared with splintered bones into the throats of all beneath it.

“What’s going on?” he mumbled to the spirit beside him.

Not that he was really bothered by the lack of lighting. The darkness, of course, troubled Pitch not at all – he could still see perfectly, albeit in monochrome – and it seemed that the same could be said for the wolves, who still looked and fussed around each other as if they weren’t surrounded by clogging darkness.

“King’s home,” Frost replied, and there was something indescribably… almost sad in his voice. “He’s home for a few hours for –”

“The family banquet,” Skreeklavic finished grimly.

As if on cue, music began to pour into the house, the sound penetrating the porous stone only to dance and prickle over everyone’s flesh. The melody was uneven, filled with the hollow sounds of deep wind chimes, tinkling pianos, and string instruments that thrummed an unsteady baseline as well as scratchier, higher notes. It was… haunting, the sound sad and on the verge of breaking, and Pitch felt something very old and not at all welcome stir in his chest.

“I need more alcohol to deal with this shit,” Phoenix muttered. The fire spirit stood and filled the palm of his hand with tiny glowing embers before using the dim light to trudge off toward the first floor.

The wolves paid him little mind, although Frost did follow the trail of fire with his eyes as it left the room. Everyone sitting on the side of the window wall had turned their heads to peer out through the glass, and when glowing caught his eye, Pitch stood, pulled his boot back onto his foot, and carefully navigated his way over clothes and empty bottles to see what was going on outside.

He nearly fell back from the window at what he saw.

_Death gods_ , Pitch thought in mild horror, his eyes tracking the movements of some of the most grotesque beings he had hoped he’d never lay eyes on.

All sitting around a long table under the white glow of tiny moving lights, the images of death from so many different human cultures, from so many realms, had congregated to dig into a divine feast of earthly food so lavish even Pitch – who didn’t need to eat – could barely peel his eyes away from the dishes. Barons with faces made of snakes, madams with pieces of flesh constantly falling from bone, hooded creatures with death-bearing touches, and scavengers with atrocious table manners. They were all there. Eating, screeching. Throwing curses onto the dining table in forms of dancing ghosts.

“The music gets sadder every year,” Xani said solemnly.

“Do you think they can tell?” Clyde wondered, and when Pitch looked back he could see the werewolf’s keen gaze sweeping over all the gods.

“Those earth-eating sacks of bones wouldn’t know their asses from their faces,” Skreeklavic growled in a truly menacing tone. He drew the attention of everyone in the room, even Frost’s blind gaze. Skreeklavic looked at Pitch then, and nodded toward the banquet outside with a hostile glow in his eyes. “They’re a bunch of lazy bastards who make Yves do all their damn work while they’re feeding their faces. Look at them. They make me sick.”

Pitch turned back out the window and searched the table for an orange glow. With a curl of his tongue, he found the Halloween King amongst all the gods, and his chest pinched in unwanted empathy when he realised that the King didn’t have a place at his own table. He was standing, form towering over most there, off to the side with a handful of skeletons at his back. His huge crows pecked at the ground in the distance.

A group of the smaller death gods lunged into a slab of meat and began tearing it to pieces gracelessly, and Pitch turned from the sight in disgust. As he was about to return to his seat, he noticed a small churning ball of stale fear slipping from the room.

Pitch’s eyes followed the sight and taste, even through solid wall, as Frost silently made his way down the hallway. He paused outside one of the doors, and a soft click was all that could be heard in the darkness as he shut himself up in one of the rooms.

“Don’t be hesitant if you want to follow him,” Skreeklavic said. Pitch jumped and whirled on the werewolf, on the verge of leaping to his own defence. But the look on Skreeklavic’s face was no form of a sneer, no amusement, no mockery. It was just quietly grave, if with a small scowl that Pitch was pretty sure wasn’t directed at him. “He’ll probably want someone with him, anyway. It’s nerve wracking being so close to those freaks when you can’t see a thing.”

_If he wants company, then why did he leave?_

“You mean the gods outside?”

Surprising him, Xani cut in with, “They can get inside at any given moment.”

“Yves’s warding repels them,” Yanov said, “but if even for a moment they thought that he was harbouring people in his house on such a sacred night, they’d break in in an instant.”

Frowning, Pitch glanced back over his shoulder at the horrifying pile of feeding corpses and monsters and ran his tongue behind the back of his teeth. _So that was the point of turning out all the lights and hiding the firelight? To make the house look empty?_

“Have they ever broken in before?” he found himself asking.

“Once,” Skreeklavic said. “Before I knew Yves. The triplets down there, the ones with the blades on their arms, ripped through the entire house in the space of a heartbeat. No one survived.”

Pitch stared, disbelieving, at the werewolf. “And yet all of you willingly lock yourselves up in here?” A brief scan of everyone in the room told Pitch that they were even crazier than he’d given them credit for. “None of you are even afraid,” he murmured.

No reply was offered, and Pitch was left staring at a group of werewolves who seemed to stare right back at him and say, “ _We have few fears, Nightmare King. And death doesn’t make the cut._ ”

One again, Pitch was lost for words. He just shook his head, smiling to himself in utter disbelief, before stalking in his usual manner out of the sitting room and into the hallway.

Whatever din may have been happening downstairs had now quietened into a whisper-loud murmur, everyone too troubled by their fear of the death lingering outside to continue on their raucous undertakings.

Pitch found Frost’s fear floating just beyond the door closest to the staircase, but as he went to turn the antique doorknob, he found himself pausing.

Should he… knock first?

_Damnit, why am I hesitating? It’s just Frost._

Exhaling, Pitch quietly pushed open the door and found the frost spirit sitting by the window on the far side of the room. The spirit went rigid when he heard the door creak, and spun viciously, his body curling off the window frame in absolute silence. Before Pitch could even track the movement, Frost was hunched, his staff held before him protectively with the coat dragging along the ground behind him.

Not a word passed between them.

Pitch scowled as two furls of darkness, looking like a pair of stamens, began to grow out of his ball of fear and curl around Frost’s throat.

“It’s me,” Pitch said finally, although he wasn’t sure exactly what he was hoping Frost would do with that revelation.

At once, the spirit’s shoulders slumped and Pitch watched as the stamens disintegrated and even the cloud of bones diminished slightly.

He tried, so very hard, to be disappointed with the reaction.

But all he could sense was confusion.

_Why is he so unafraid of me that I’m an_ alleviator _of his fear? Had ten years ago taught him nothing? Or is his memory just that terrible?_

“Pitch. Fuck. Thank god,” Frost panted with a nervous laugh. “I thought you were Urie and Grey for a second there. Ugh, I hope Phoenix doesn’t run into them downstairs. There are so many curtains down there and he’s bound to set a few alight if he fights with Urie. I _really_ don’t want to die in a house fire –”

“Frost.” Pitch inaudibly shut the door behind him. “You’re rambling.”

Frost clamped his mouth shut, cheeks darkening slightly, and Pitch had to smile at the spirit’s embarrassment. It unsettled him that Frost was insane enough to string Pitch’s name and “thank god” in the same breath without phrasing it as “thank god it’s _not_ Pitch”. In sullen retrospect, though, he supposed he couldn’t really expect to retain his fear factor when he was so weak, when he and Frost kept meeting in such mundane situations, when he kept doing everything his evil fibres told him not to by helping the spirit when he fell into desperation.

Pitch flexed his fingers as he passed by the large quilted bed in the middle of the room. He needed to sort out whatever short circuit had happened in his brain to make him susceptible to the requests of the frost spirit. He was meant to hate him, he _did_ hate him, enough so that he longed to just press his thumbs into that pale throat and watch the life melt from Frost’s eyes.

_So why do I keep bloody well helping him?_

He needed to figure it out fast. Before he wound up helping the idiot only to land himself in dire straits.

_….such as getting myself locked in a house with a bunch of death gods swarming outside._

Pitch sighed as he found a comfortable spot on the opposite side of the window ledge. His back against the frame, he mirrored the position Frost had blindly felt his way into as he’d been contemplating the spirit’s murder. Frost pulled his legs up to his chest and tucked his staff between his thighs, all the while keeping a sharp eye on the gathering outside.

_Is he watching them to make sure they don’t come near the house?_

“They’ll be out there for a while,” Frost said quietly. “Then the King will leave again and finish his run and the sun will rise. So, uh, it’ll be a while yet before the lights come on. No fun card games until then.”

“I’ll try and contain my disappointment.”

Frost smirked, his head falling against the dark glass. Pitch kept his eyes on the spirit, watching as the smirk lingered on his lips a little longer than necessary, probably because his mind had wandered to the horrors outside. Why couldn’t Pitch just reach over and cut the life out of the spirit while they were alone? While he wasn’t bound by Inari’s ethical work policy (she was truly a fearful force when wronged) or being hunted for trying to liberate this world of its stupid existence?

The music from outside offered a haunting soundtrack to Pitch’s homicidal turmoil.

“Why can’t I just get rid of you?” Pitch murmured.

Frost flinched. His gaze drifted from outside, losing focus in the darkness before they settled on Pitch’s dimly glowing eyes. There was a hardness, a coldness to them that gave Pitch the impression that Jack was feigning ignorance when he asked, “What did you say?”

Pitch didn’t answer, and Frost turned back to the window and curled himself into a tighter ball. “That book you were reading in the Emporium.”

His novel? “What about it?”

“There’s a copy of it here, if you wanted to keep reading.” He laughed a little, but the sound was brittle. “It’s actually Phoenix’s but he’s so scared of you he wouldn’t put up a fuss if you wanted to borrow it.”

Pitch stared at the spirit curiously. _When you had asked me what it was about, I didn’t think you were actually interested. But…_

“You remembered the title?”

“I recognised it. It’s an old one Phoenix read to us once. I didn’t realise it until I remembered that Phoenix had a stash of his novels here, though.”

Something about Frost’s tone disconcerted Pitch. It was nostalgic, almost ironically so for one who looked so young, but revoltingly sad. Nothing like the embarrassing, aggressive memories shared between those still drinking out in the sitting room.

Pitch licked his lips. “Us?”

Frost look at him, startled, then quickly slid his eyes back out the window.

_No answer?_ Pitch thought, a little intrigued. _You’re more complicated than you let on, Frost._

Since he was a _tactful_ villain, though, Pitch let the topic go as he scanned the commotion down below. “What did you think of it? The story.”

Frost snorted. “Are you making small talk with me, Pitch Black?” The brat had the audacity to sound charmed, and Pitch wished, for once, that it was light enough for Frost to experience the full effect of the glare he put upon him. Although by the amused chuckle he supposed Frost guessed Pitch’s reaction to his tease, and added, “Have you finished it yet?”

“Numerous times.”

Frost’s smile turned a shade of melancholic Pitch had never seen on the spirit before.

_Tonight, I’m seeing a lot of sides of the idiot I haven’t seen before. The extent of his corrupted vocabulary included._

“I hated it,” Frost admitted. “The main guy, the doctor, he was so determined and so in love. All he wanted was to be happy and get his wife back, and by the time you realise he’s completely lost his mind and all the good and bad guys have switched sides, it’s too late.”

His eyes trailed around the dark room, a distance in them that sent a chill along the exposed skin of Pitch’s neck and hands. “Someone should’ve told him that dead things should stay dead,” the spirit murmured distractedly. “Problem solved.”

Pitch stiffened, and he was reminded, for an irritating moment, of the words that’d come spilling from the fire spirit’s mouth earlier that night.

“How cynical,” he said slowly, unsure what to do about Frost’s reaction.

Luckily, though, Pitch’s response seemed to snap Frost out of whatever trance he’d sunk into, and the spirit exclaimed, “It was an unexpectedly sad story! I was rooting for him right up until he lost his shit, and even then I still just wanted him to be happy.”

“Even while he was killing everyone he was once friends with?”

“They had all been lying to him. They lied to the point that he believed their lies were the truth and then _they_ blamed him for it. It was just so unfair –”

Frost’s voice caught, suddenly, in his throat, and Pitch frowned when he saw a spike of splintered white bone shoot out of the ball of darkness and through Frost’s chest. He knew it was just a projection of the darkness, the manifestation of the sixth sense, but sometimes the hallucinations looked a little too real for Pitch’s complete comfort.

Glancing out the window, he went rigid when he saw that one of the death gods had strayed away from the feast. The withered body wobbled, headdress tipping, staff digging into the soil around bony feet, toward the house, its hollow sockets pointing toward the second story windows. In the distance Pitch could see the King tense, eyes flaring brightly.

Frost’s panic was pungent as the god wandered closer, and, not really wanting to end up as a flayed piece of meat himself, Pitch gathered the darkness in the house with what little energy he’d been able to accumulate during the evening. The shadows in each room shifted (albeit sluggishly, to Pitch’s annoyance) and slithered their way over to the windows facing the back fields. Across both the second and first floors, darkness smeared itself over the transparent surfaces, creating a thick clogging veil that not even an all-powerful god would be able to peer through.

The lumpy shadows rolled past Pitch’s head, lightly stroking his cheek on its journey, and across the glass separating himself and Frost. When the shadows reached Frost’s face, the spirit flinched back from the window, a different flavour of fear rising in him for a moment. But then his gaze flickered over the entirely covered window and realisation settled his alarm.

Below, the death god seemed to squint for a moment, then turned back to the banquet.

Frost exhaled a shaking, relieved breath. “So, uh, yeah. I thought the story was sad.” His eyes flickered in Pitch’s direction. “You seem to like it though, if you’ve read it so much.”

He hummed as he held his fingers up to the rolling darkness covering the window. Tiny wisps of shadow curled off and around his fingers like worms. “Did you know it’s a true story?”

Frost blinked in surprise. “Seriously?”

The darkness wove itself into a thin lattice over the back of his hand, but the links were brittle and kept dispersing. “Edited post-mortem, but true nonetheless.” He hesitated for just a moment before deciding to add, “The man the doctor was based on, he was a part of one of my old alliances.”

Frost was silent for a few minutes. “I’m sorry.”

Pitch’s head snapped up at unexpectedly soft reply, the darkness rearing off his hand as if stung. “Why?”

“Was he your friend?”

Oh. He was trying to be thoughtful, was he? Pitch scoffed at the absurdity of both the question and the kind words he was being inflicted with. “Friend? No. He was a psychopath and an unpredictable nutcase. He also had the worst sense of humour on this dreadful planet. His jokes were atrocious.”

A small mouth quirked. “I think some were recorded in the story.”

“Absolute garbage,” Pitch said by way of agreement.

Outside, the King gave a discrete head-nod to some of his skeletons, and, hands linked, they all formed a dancing chain that circled the entire dining area. A few monsters clapped in time to the skipping, others watched on with pleasure or judgement. None seemed to realise it was to deter any more of them from straying toward the house (as Pitch assumed it was).

“I’m sorry about making fun of your job,” Frost blurted.

Pitch nearly fell off his perch in shock. Frost was… apologising to him? He looked at the spirit in surprise, allowing the expression to surface purely because he knew Frost couldn’t see his face through the darkness.

“You just –,” he continued, swallowing. “I don’t know. I used to have great impulse control, I swear. It’s just been replaced over the years by…”

Frost trailed off, and Pitch felt his shock being replaced by something… uneasy. He immediately decided he didn’t like the feeling, and his defences rose, pikes and all. “Recklessness?” he supplied dryly. “Stupidity? _Fun_?”

Frost flinched at the last suggestion, probably because the word was practically spat at him, and screwed his face up. “All of the above?”

Pitch swallowed and forced his voice to even. “I want to be clear,” he said lowly, and Frost tensed at his tone. “We are not on friendly terms. I am not your comrade or your buddy and I definitely do not care for your opinion on how I live my life. We may not be at war while we’re locked in this house, but you and I stand on very different paths that will only converge when one wishes to devour the other.”

There was a breath of silence, after which Pitch saw Frost’s grip on his staff tighten until the wood creaked. “Yeah,” the spirit replied, his eyes dropping back outside as his voice lost all of its earlier energy.

Pitch leaned forward, and purely because he was a bastard, added, “For the sake of those children-saving weirdoes you sided with, remember the choice you made.”

The temperature in the room dropped, almost noticeably. “ _I get it_ ,” Frost snapped.

_Hatred. Good. I can deal with hatred._

Slipping off the sill, Pitch wafted through the darkness and toward the doorway. He’d done his damage. Now he’d let Frost stew until it finally sunk in that Pitch was the kind of person best left alone.

“Do you want your coat back?”

Pitch looked back over his shoulder and saw that Frost’s hands had released his staff and were pressing into his head, fingers tangling in his colourless hair. He winced, shuddered, and Pitch had half a mind to check to make sure the spirit wasn’t having a fit.

_I’m not meant to care_ , he told himself, and yet he remained by the doorway until Frost stopped shaking and looked over in his direction.

“In the morning,” Pitch murmured, and silently slipped from the room.

 

The rest of the night trickled by solemnly. When the death gods were finally herded from the realm, the music drifted away for good and didn’t return. The King had his skeletons clean the mess left behind and lit the house back up again before departing himself. The card game recommenced, and Pitch narrowly escaped having to permanently offer up his boot to Skreeklavic as punishment for putting it back on.

Phoenix returned from downstairs substantially more drunk – so drunk, in fact, that he stole Tanton’s spot on the loveseat and told Frost to “just get over here and be my bitch for the night”. Without so much as a glance at Pitch, Frost obliged the drunkard’s request, curling up beside the other spirit with the occasional complaint about how warm Phoenix’s armpit was.

The sight didn’t bother Pitch at all. Not when Phoenix wrapped his arm around Frost’s neck and laughed into his white hair, not when the pair began murmuring to each other, their faces so close that Phoenix’s breath fogged because of the temperature difference. And especially not when Pitch realised that the room was warm, almost stiflingly hot, without the freezing presence beside him.

Morning couldn’t have arrived fast enough.

But arrive it did, mercifully, after another four rounds that ended in Pitch’s unexpected victory.

Well, unexpected to everyone except Frost, who, when Clyde began his heckling, just stared the werewolf down with a growing smirk that seemed to insult the wolf on levels mere mortal words could not.

Dawn, in the King’s realm, arose with a burning sun that set alight the mountains facing the front of the house. Bolts of red and purple fire shot across the sky, tinting the air with a warm hue, and the doors and windows were released from their strained hold.

The entire first floor departed before the King had even returned, various forms of screaming or silent transport shooting them through the realm’s barriers. Eventually, it was desolate enough for Pitch to comfortably descend and emerge into fresh air.

“Smells like pumpkins,” he muttered, wrinkling his nose as he leaned against the warped, splintered wood of the porch.

A thunderous bang resonated from the end of the house’s footpath, and Pitch stood a little straighter as plumes of purple-black smoke rolled into existence.

The smoke spat out a handful of crows and the King before dissipating.

_He doesn’t look too good_ , Pitch thought with a frown as he watched the King drag himself toward his own home. His limbs, once rigid and proud, had cracked under themselves. It seemed as if he was walking on his knees, the extensions from his elbows to his wrists dragging along the ground behind him. He looked exhausted, his face haggard, the stitches across his mouth untwining and hanging down past his chest.

The crows, now the size of large dogs, huddled under his cape to make sure it didn’t snag anything on his trek to the front door, and Pitch almost had to smile at the sight of the carnivorous creatures being so doting.

When the King pulled himself up his small porch staircase, Pitch could see that his eyes had dimmed, the once-glowing tears now smouldering as if their light would soon extinguish. And yet they still had enough energy to brighten, if only slightly, when the King caught sight of Pitch.

“You darkened the windows last night.” The King’s voice was no longer ethereal, but rather a broken echo of it, accompanied every other syllable by a voice that sounded very human.

“I did,” Pitch replied, trying not to stare at the way the half-broken stitches now pulled the skin around the King’s mouth when he talked. It seemed like it would be painful.

The King rasped a heart-felt, if eerie, “Thank you,” and Pitch was struck into dumb silence.

Skreeklavic came limping, footsteps heavy and loud, out the front door and proceeded to gather the King’s wilted limps around his own shoulders. He muttered something too low for Pitch to catch, and a weak smile tugged at the corner of the King’s half-sewn mouth as the two hobbled into the house.

Pitch had been completely ignored, but for once he was utterly okay with the fact.

“You ready to go?”

Pitch turned and raised a non-existent eyebrow at the frost spirit in the doorway. “I didn’t realise we were travelling together.”

Frost flushed and gritted his teeth. He took a deep breath, then let it back out through his nose. Pitch’s mouth tilted at the display, and Frost glowered. “It’ll be a while until Yves is strong enough to let us use his skulls, and I need to get this to Tooth before she thinks I’m dead.” He held up the book he’d gotten from the Emporium the other night. “Or ran off with her money.” He lowered his arm and looked away. “But I can wait if you don’t want to.”

Pitch pinched the bridge of his nose. _This will be the last time_ , he told himself. He’d finish what he started then return to the Emporium and bribe Inari to create a ward specifically to keep Frost out of the shop. “It’s fine.” Then he had a thought. “But are you sure you want me to drop you in Punjam Hy Loo? Just the other week you were worried I would destroy the place.”

“ _Are_ you going to attack it?”

He clicked his tongue. “I suppose it would be unwise in my current state.” Plus Inari was _still_ giving him grief for the last time he’d wrecked the palace. He didn’t need any more of her judgement in his life. “What about your weird little ghost?”

Frost shrugged. “I looked around for it just before, but if it was here it’d be tripping over our feet by now. If it managed to get in here, it can probably get itself out again.”

Pitch accepted the answer with a nod (he wasn’t going to argue with the spirit on the matter, since he really didn’t want to be teleporting that strange thing anyway). Holding out his hand toward the still unlit corners of the porch, he summoned a batch of shadows strong enough to get them through the realm’s barrier. Everyone else seemed to have a simple time of leaving, but then again Pitch was relying on a waning power source for transportation through a strong barrier, and he realised with an annoyed sigh that, at his full power, he could probably usher in a dozen people without breaking a single sweat.

After a moment, Pitch noticed that the shadows weren’t appearing. Frowning, he stomped over to a dark corner of the porch and squatted. He held out a hand and a few wisps of darkness curled around his fingers, but the second he disturbed them, the darkness stuttered and dissipated.

_Hell. No._

“Are you going to do this to me right now?” Pitch snarled at the shadows, and the clump trembled under the weight of his anger. “ _Seriously_?”

A tight pain lanced through his chest, and Pitch grabbed at it on a gush of an exhale.

“Pitch, what’s wrong?”

Knotting his fingers in the fabric of his shirt, he blew out a harsh breath and stood. Grinding his teeth in frustration, he uttered, “I don’t have enough power.”

“Power? Like, the shadows? I guess it is sunrise, should we go inside or –”

The look Pitch gave Frost was dark and menacing. He knew the spirit didn’t deserve it, but by hell he was mad and not at all a good enough person to contain it. “Power as in, _I need to feed_.”

Frost swallowed. “Feed?”

“Fear. I don’t scare people to death out of enjoyment alone.”

Frost began chewing on the inside of his cheek, jaw working as Pitch mentally reminded this world about how much he loathed it. His fingers pressed into his throbbing chest and massaged.

“Would it –” Frost flinched when Pitch’s eyes snapped to him “– would it help if you did that thing you pulled in the Emporium? When you had me hallucinating.”

His hand stilled. “What?”

Frost winced, and Pitch watched as the spirit’s face contorted for a moment before he said, “That thing you did with your creepy –”

“I know what you’re talking about,” Pitch interrupted as Frost did a very bad job of trying to smooth out his crumpled forehead with the spine of his book. “But why would you suggest I do that to you again? Last I recall, you didn’t enjoy the first time very much.”

Tome half-concealing his face, the gaze emitted from the single eye Pitch could see sharpened tenfold. “Look, do you want some fear or do you want to have to grovel to Yves because you can’t teleport yourself?”

_“You are a king too, are you not?”_

Appealing to his pride instead of answering his question? How tactical. Pitch’s eyes narrowed in suspicion. “You’re offering this?” _Even after what I said to you last night?_

Frost’s arm dropped, his brows meeting in irritation and maybe, if Pitch’s instincts weren’t haywire, a little bit of pain.

_What’s going on with him?_

“I _am_ the reason you’re stuck here in the first place,” Frost said reasonably, jaw ticking. “Because it’s fucking fair,” he seemed to add under his breath.

With more than a hint of snideness, Pitch mentally snipped, _You’re also the reason I lost my power in the first place_.

But then looking at Frost’s damned face, he groaned, ran a hand down the side of his own face, and told himself to snap out of it. Frost was offering him fear, fear he _needed_ , and far be it from Pitch to turn away a decent meal in times of need.

Even if Frost was beyond insane to offer himself up as a living sacrifice.

Pitch’s hand fell from his chest and he took a step toward the frost spirit. A determined step – one which the spirit read surprisingly well, and made quick work of closing the front door with his staff so no one inside would hear them.

He watched as Frost’s fear, his nerves, began to tumble around in his torso. There was also a strand of tension running through his neck so tautly that Pitch thought it might slice through his pale skin. “I’ll need to touch you for this,” he warned, remembering how the spirit had jumped the last time their skin had made contact. Frost raised an eyebrow dubiously, and Pitch pointed at his head. “Just your head.”

“You didn’t have to last time.”

“I don’t have the energy to do what I did back then. This will be different.”

Frost’s stiffened. “Will it be worse?”

“I can’t say,” was all Pitch could really offer as a reply.

Letting out a shaking breath, Frost looked down at the items in his possession, his eyes lingering on his staff. Pitch rubbed the back of his head, itching to comb his fingers through his hair in his agitation. “If you want me to stop, say so and I will,” he offered, since Frost was doing this of his own volition and all.

Frost looked at him in surprise, then he rolled his eyes. “Like that means much,” he muttered, but went ahead and rested his staff against the house anyway. He placed the book on the windowsill and turned back to Pitch.

Pitch reached for his head, and Frost squeezed his eyes shut.

_You’re not going to want to do that_ , Pitch silently warned as his fingers brushed over the spirit’s temples, slipping under his hair. The spirit jolted again at the touch, but a moment later the pads of Pitch’s fingers were pressing into icy skin and every bone in the spirit’s body seized in panic.

Blue eyes shot open, and he looked around the porch, his gaze frantic as his fears began to bubble into incoherent sculptures in his chest. “This is different,” Frost gasped.

“This method expends less energy,” Pitch murmured, focused. “You won’t see anything, but all of your other senses will experience it.”

“Like being in the dark.”

A hum. “Somewhat.”

Cold fingers curled around his wrists and squeezed too tightly. “Just… don’t dig too deep, yeah?”

Pitch swallowed at the request. The amount of trust Frost had invested in him was incredibly stupid. So stupid, in fact, that Frost would rightfully deserve every episodic moment of the psychotic breakdown he’d experience if Pitch really let loose.

And yet, despite that insanely stupidly placed trust, and the even more foolish owner of it, Pitch couldn’t bring himself to abuse either. “I’ll try,” he promised instead, and the cold hands fell away to grasp at the coat still adorning Frost’s slim frame.

As vowed, Pitch sifted through Frost’s mind, through his fears, without lingering to take any notice of their significances. Although the night spent with Frost had piqued his curiosity, he wasn’t enough of a savage to drag all of the spirit’s darkest secrets to the forefront of his mind for his own personal use. The only memories he could access were ones linked directly to fears, and these memories he simply skimmed over, accessing instead the quality of fear attached like gnawing leeches to each.

Although he’d seen most of this before, back in the Emporium, Pitch still found himself disquieted at seeing so many darkened fears, so many shadowed terrors Frost refused to acknowledge. It wasn’t new sight for Pitch – he was the king of fear, after all – but it did concern him more than it should have. Fears hidden like that… they weren’t healthy fears, not like the intricate, exposed network that helped create the personality of the spirit he was currently using as a food source. Terrors shrouded by darkness were dangerous on a subconscious level, and had the strength to destroy a person if provoked too badly.

For the sake of the mind of the spirit under his fingers, Pitch stayed well clear of these landmines.

Pitch began to sweat as he glided over the weaker fears. Frost twitched and made the odd noise when he felt or heard something near him, until Pitch finally found a fear strong enough to feed his addiction.

It was the same curious one he’d found in the Emporium, the one that had nearly given him an aneurism when he’d tried to extract a useful image from it. The fear whose sculpture was that churning, burning pile of glass and blood and snow. It tasted terrible, the sensation was horrid, but it would do the trick.

Pitch honed his focus, his force, and Frost made a terribly hurt noise. “Oh god.”

“Do you want me to stop?” Pitch managed to ask, though his voice was strained.

“N-no.” A pause, a choked breath that turned into a light sob. “Can you s-s-see what that is?”

“I can’t.”

“G-good.”

Pitch felt strength, sustenance, health, flow back into his system. His neck cracked as his head rocked back with the sensation of the power. He felt Frost twitch in his hold, jerk and shiver, before icy fingers grabbed hold of his shirt, clinging for dear life. Pitch didn’t move away this time, but instead probed gently, noticing, curiously, that the memory attached to this fear had its own darkness sticking to it, veiling it, concealing its contents.

Without his permission, his fingers slid deeper into Frost’s hair, his thumbs brushing over an icy forehead and skimming his hairline.

But then something suddenly shifted in Frost’s mind. The fear Pitch had been niggling at, worming his way into, suddenly collapsed and its remains transformed. Pitch faltered at the sight he was suddenly presented with.

That furled, decaying, black lotus.

A burst of terror so bright and hot it burnt even the Nightmare King himself lit up Frost’s mind. His legs gave way beneath him, and Pitch was already turning off the fear, extracting himself from Frost’s head, even before the spirit started begging, “ _Stop. Stop. Stop_ –”

Moving from his head to his thin arms, Pitch gripped the spirit to prevent him from hitting the ground. “I stopped. It’s over.” The spirit was a dead weight, and Pitch lowered him to his knees as he knelt in front of him. “Frost, can you hear me?”

He was heaving, shuddering. His eyes were opened wide but his stare was blind, unseeing. Pitch’s fingers dug into his shoulders, causing the spirit to flinch in pain, and in a calming voice, coaxed, “Jack. Jack, look at me.”

Frost’s eyes snapped to Pitch’s face, and Pitch watched the fear slowly, in miniscule increments, begin to fade. He eased up on his grip and, absently, began to rub Frost’s slender shoulders as the spirit tried to steady his breathing. His coat had cooled from spending an entire night on the frost spirit, but it began to warm again under the ministration of his fingers.

Frost shuddered, for one last time, and Pitch’s hands stopped moving. He pulled back and Frost was forced to let go of his shirt so Pitch could stand.

Scrubbing his hands over his face, the spirit sat back on his ass and groaned. “I feel like I need a bath. It’s almost worse when you can’t see that shit.” He looked up at Pitch with a gaze that was understandably a little haunted. “Now are we ready to go?”

Pitch held out his hands and, on command, shadows began to flock around him. He sighed in relief and gestured for Frost to ready himself. “We are.”

 

Punjam Hy Loo was at peace that day. Even though it was filled to the brim with frantic faeries and their compulsive boss, the palace, if it was capable of sentient thought, would have considered itself happy. Contented. In a state of wonderful, bustling bliss.

However it most definitely would not have remained so if it had eyes opened wide enough to see the dark ball of shadows that formed and quickly disappeared on one of the ridges in its direct view.

“I can take it from here,” Frost said, disentangling himself from Pitch’s hold and digging his staff into the rocks so he wouldn’t tip off the edge of the cliff. “Tooth probably has an anti-Pitch turret somewhere and I’d hate to see you sprayed with bullets so early in the day.”

Pitch smiled, if only a little, at the razor edge of sarcasm in the spirit’s voice.

A light dusting of purple splashed across Frost’s pale cheeks. “Thanks for the ride,” he added, eyes averted.

Pitch flexed his fingers. He didn’t want the spirit’s thanks. He just wanted to get out of his proximity so he could rearrange his thoughts again. Their little moment on the King’s porch had, sadly, been the most contact he’d had with another being for a while now, and he could still feel the cold of Frost’s skin under his fingers, the soft brush of hair on the back of Pitch’s hand.

“My coat,” was his reply. Frost startled, as if remembering he wasn’t in his own clothes, and gave Pitch his book and staff to hold while he stripped out of the garment. Frost grimaced at the state of his hoodie, and when he took his staff back from Pitch, created a furl of frost to cover over the gaping burn in the material. He repeated the process for the other burns and stains on the material until he looked like he was wearing plated armour over his clothes.

He went to take the book back, and the ice on his arm cracked and fell off. It was instantly replaced, but until he found some new clothes the spirit was going to find manoeuvrability quite awkward.

“You still owe me a favour,” Pitch mentioned once he’d thrown the chilly coat back onto his shoulders. The garment smelt familiar, a fact that he was still getting used to considering his old shadow-born cloaks didn’t have any scent at all, but now accompanied with a the hint of a scent that reminded Pitch of cold, crisp snow and the beginning of winter’s frigid rains.

He didn’t know how he felt about the flavour combination.

…That was, until the stench of ash entered Pitch’s brain – most likely from the damn fire spirit cuddling up to Frost – and Pitch decided that the Emporium’s dry-cleaning services would be getting a visit from him.

Frost paused for a moment, looking like he was about to object. But then he reconsidered and just sighed. “Well, I’m good for more things besides destroying the world. So like, if you need your socks washed or something, hit me up,” he joked.

But Pitch was beyond jovial chatting at this point, and closed the distance between them in one stride to purr, “And if I wanted you to lay this world to waste for me?”

Frost’s flush darkened and spread to the tips of his ears, his eyes growing wide and maybe a touch fearful as Pitch’s face settled a little too close for the spirit’s comfort. Pitch smirked at the reaction and added, “When I come and reap that favour you owe me, I promise you that it will most definitely _not_ involve so menial a task as clothes-washing.”

He straightened again, his coat whipping around his legs as a fierce wind tore through the mountains, and his shadows began to curl around him. “Now shoo. Some of us have _actual_ jobs to get to.”

And Pitch disappeared.

 

* * *

 

 

Abandoned on the ridges, Jack fell to his knees on the jagged rocks and doubled over, torn between laughing, _screaming_ , and hurtling himself into the ravine below.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you again for the kudos and the comments! They make me so happy ^.^  
> 


	9. A Pair of Feathered Messengers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A crow with too much sass comes for Jack, he (Jack, but also the crow) and Pitch undergo a semi-uncomfortable shopping experience, and engage in a not-bonding moment (Jack and Pitch, not the crow).

North had lost his mind.

He usually did, this close to Christmas, but this year was a whole lot worse than usual. The day the Workshop had gotten trashed had pushed North’s schedule so far back he’d fallen into desperation with less than two months left until the big day. He was currently on a rampage somewhere in the Workshop, a red and white striped bandanna tied across his forehead and a megaphone in his hand so he could yell at whichever yeti he chose from whatever balcony he wished.

He’d also acquired some part time workers – one of which was Bunnymund, who was currently downstairs painting toys instead of eggs.

Jack had rocked up when he’d heard the Pooka had transferred departments for the Christmas rush, mostly to make fun of the guy, but also to see if he could offer a hand himself. Although he had to keep a constant eye out North’s frosted windows for the little spirit, Jack felt obligated, in a sense, to at least try and help the old man out. He knew how important Christmas was to the kids, and he knew even better what would happen to North – physically and emotionally – if he didn’t meet his deadline.

But his semi-good intentions hadn’t worked so well in Jack’s favour, and he’d been officially banned from toy decorating when he’d proven how much artistic skill he lacked.

“I am Jack Frost. I can trace the finest furls of frost across any surface I want. SO WHY WON’T THIS STUPID BRUSH STAY IN THE LINES?!”

“Mate, what are you – holy Easter baskets, Jack, how did you even _do_ that? You know what? Give me the brush. Give it. And go stand over there. Waaaay over there.”

And so, exiled by Bunny the Perfectionist who had green paint on his nose, Jack reclined on a supporting beam a few yards above Bunny’s head, legs swinging as he curled frost absently over the wood. From this height he could see the detailed swirls Bunny was painting on the toy figurine resting in his paw, but, even more importantly, he had an uninterrupted view of the giant glass window Bunny was using as his light source, and the vast expanse of snow on the eastern side of the Workshop.

_…which just leaves the other three sides of the Workshop vulnerable._

Although he really didn’t want to, Jack was starting to toss up the prospect of bailing now that he wasn’t actually being of any help. He enjoyed the time he spent in North’s Workshop, even in its busiest times, and it made him a little sad when he realised that as long as the spirit was following him, he probably couldn’t spent any more than a few hours here.

_Not unless you want North to lose his swords permanently this time._

But why did the spirit even _want_ North’s swords? And why did it choose to follow Jack around like some lost cause rather than put its spare time to good use and actually _finish_ what it had started weeks ago?

Maybe it had lost interest in North’s swords. Realised the metal was too heavy or something and had given up on the one and only ambitious practice Jack had ever witnessed the thing undertake.

_Do you really want to take that chance?_

No. No he didn’t. Especially since the spirit made absolutely zero sense and Jack still didn’t know what it wanted from him.

Sighing, Jack spied the focused rabbit. “You sure your eggs won’t get jealous while you’re here?”

Bunny sent him a dark look as paint globed off the end of his brush and onto his leg. “Don’t you have someone else to pester?”

_At least he’s gotten over his anger and absorbed Tooth’s advice for once._

“I’m too afraid to try and bug North, so no. Lucky you.”

Bunny looked like he really couldn’t argue with that logic – he was avoiding North’s wrath himself by holing up in this secluded room – and changed paintbrushes for a new colour. As he swirled a new set of bristles in a jar of water, he said, “Hey, Jack.”

Jack’s eyes skirted away when Bunny looked back up at him. _He’s initiating conversation. This isn’t a good sign_. “Yeah?”

“Have you… have you had a talk to North or Tooth lately?”

_He really can’t let go, can he?_

“Not really.”

Then he nearly had to laugh at himself. Bunny just kept on asking all the wrong questions, didn’t he? He was tiptoeing around whatever delicate situation he was trying to unmask, and Jack could just keep fending him off with truthful answers that contained only the barest hint of a lie.

Not that Jack really knew what was going down with North and Tooth either.

_But you have more of a clue than Bunny._

“Only because the damn box keeps calling my name,” he muttered.

“Speak up, mate.”

“Why are you asking me about Tooth and North?” Jack quickly replied.

“I think they’re not telling me and Sandy something. I mean, you must have seen Tooth’s tower when you went over to visit Vanish. It was wrecked, and she won’t tell anyone how it got that way. And North… he’s been acting weird ever since that day everything went to hell in here.”

Jack let his eyes drop down to Bunny and he frowned slightly at the concern knitting his furry brows. “You can’t blame North for being upset that his workers nearly killed each other.”

“What? No! I’m not! Not at all. Crickey, it’s just that everyone is really tense and they won’t let me help ‘em.”

_Under all that pride and those snarky remarks, he has a huge heart, doesn’t he?_

A little bit irritated that he had to be the voice of reason, Jack pressed his temple into the old wood and gave Bunny the least crappiest answer he could think of. “You should trust them, Bunny. Trust that they’ll call on you if they need help.”

_Have some faith in the lies they tell you._

The Pooka sighed and turned back to his little figurine. “I know I should. I’m just worried. You know, don’t want everything going to hell again, right?” He laughed, but the sound fell short of what little hope he was trying to bring with it.

Jack swallowed. He opened his mouth, maybe to crack a joke to try and improve Bunny’s spirits, maybe to tell the Pooka to stop being such a wet blanket and mind his own business. He didn’t know – and he would never know, because as soon as sound started forming in the back of his throat, a piercing _caaaaw_ shattered the sound.

Jack froze.

_Caaaaawwww_.

Was that…?

Bunny’s head rotated slowly on his shoulders, and he looked back at Jack suspiciously. “Did you say something?”

Jack tumbled off the beam, and had to borrow a gust of wind to make sure he didn’t land on his ass. The gust, coincidently enough, drew a little too strongly and as foil papers were kicked up on Bunny’s work table – causing the Pooka to go into a right fit – Jack threw the oversized rabbit a jumbled apology and ran from the workroom.

He found the crow sitting on an elf waiting outside the door, black talons digging into the soft material of the stupid elf’s hat. Jack eyed the tiny Christmas creature with a hint of incredulity as it tried to offer him a glass of milk with a dumb smile on its face.

_Does it even realise there’s a bird sitting on its head?_

“Uh, no thanks little guy. Bunny would probably love some, though.”

Just as he had begun to deflate at Jack’s rejection, the elf perked right back up again and rushed into the workroom, splashing milk all over Jack’s foot, itself, and the crow stupid enough to choose an elf as a parking spot.

The elf disappeared through the door, and the crow reared back off its hat before it could be dragged with it. Ruffling out black feathers, it flapped up and around Jack’s head – causing the frost spirit to duck for the sake of his eyes and beautiful face – before soaring off toward North’s office.

“These crows,” he muttered as he followed, obediently, behind the damn bird. The thing flew fast, and although Jack could definitely keep up with it if he was flying himself, he was too worried about the wind potentially knocking over any of the stacks of toys on the floors above or below him. Plus, it wasn’t like he’d lose the bird anyway, what with the trail of black feathers it was leaving in its wake.

In North’s office, the bird was perched on the edge of a model rail way – the train supposed to be running on the tracks floating off somewhere around the room, as it usually did – cleaning its feathers as it waited for Jack.

“Did Yves send you?” Jack asked as he closed the door behind him.

The crow cawed once, an affirmative (or so Jack, who was admittedly a little rusty in evil bird speak, assumed), and Jack straightened. Yves had never sent him a formal crow before. What did this mean? Did Yves need help with something? Was some disaster taking place in his realm? _Did he need saving?_

…Or did Skreek get around to telling him about the furniture that had almost been ruined by Phoenix’s rage and did Yves want him back so he could decapitate him on his own home turf?

Jack bit his lip. “Is he mad at me?”

The crow just stared at him flatly. It shifted, and, balancing on one leg, wiggled a clenched foot at Jack. The spirit held out a hand obligingly, and the crow’s talons opened.

A tiny skull dropped into Jack’s palm.

“It’s so small!” he laughed, rolling the marble-sized skull over his skin. “Wait, this isn’t going to explode or anything, is it?”

The crow looked positivity done with Jack’s shit, and the spirit squinted at the piece of bone. Its jaw… was its jaw moving? He held it closer to his face, and when he heard a hissing sound, went ahead and held it to his ear.

“Dude,” he breathed when he realised the skull was talking.

If Jack could have discerned any sort of pupil in the bird’s evil black orbs, he would have sworn the crow rolled its eyes at him.

In a raspy little whisper, the skull informed Jack that he should get his ass back to Yves’s place because _Skreek_ needed his help. Jack heaved a sigh, relieved that he wasn’t going to be murdered by an angry Yves. But the skull was still hissing, and Jack’s relief fell flat when the skull added that Pitch had received a similar invitation, and Jack better not arrive without him in tow.

“Goddamn,” he muttered, his stomach pulling in a tight knot at the thought of having to see Pitch again so soon.

It had barely been three days since the guy had dumped him outside Punjam Hy Loo with nothing but a stupid smile that Jack just wanted to tear from his face and keep safe from his shitty personality, and a promise – which sounded a hell of a lot like a threat, _Pitch_ – that would probably ruin Jack’s life forever.

_And a joke. A fucking joke._

Three days was definitely not enough time to recover from Pitch’s questionable disposition. Or for Pitch himself to do away with whatever stick got shoved up his ass whenever Jack acted just a slice too nice for him to handle.

“He’s such a psycho,” Jack murmured.

_Did you expect the Nightmare King to be_ normal _?_

Jack considered that. Obviously he hadn’t hoped for miracles from Pitch, but maybe he’d expected perhaps a little more civility than Pitch was willing to exercise. Such as for him to drop all of his grudges against the frost spirit and warm up to him as quickly as Skreek and the wolves had.

“I guess it wouldn’t work that way, would it?” he admitted. “I mean, I’d never screwed over Skreek before I’d met him, so he didn’t have much of a reason to hate me in the first place.”

_You should just give up on whatever shit you’re trying to pull with Pitch._

Jack frowned. “I’m not trying to pull anything with him.”

_Doesn’t look like it. Looks like you’re trying to get along with the guy._

“What’s so wrong with that?”

_HE’S AN EVIL FUCKING ASSHOLE._

Pain, as bright as a flash grenade, burnt through Jack’s temples and he fell back on his ass. He groaned, fingers digging into his scalp as his ears rang.

_Stay down. This is where you need to be._

“I need to help Skreek,” he groaned as the ringing got louder. He could barely hear himself talk, but his thoughts, those vicious words, were almost deafeningly loud. The volume in his head skyrocketed as everything else fell into an awful buzzing.

_Villains like him don’t need your help._

“Everyone needs help.” Cotton wool covered his ears, his mouth, was stuffed down his throat until he started choking.

_What about North? Toothiana? What about your allies here? Don’t_ they _need your help? Shouldn’t you be doing more than sponging off them like some rodent and help them_ fix _their problems?_

“I can’t,” he coughed, retching. “They won’t – I-I _can’t_.”

_Congratulations, you are officially the most useless Guardian in history._

“I’m not useless!”

_You’re useless and a pitiful coward who is too afraid to help your allies._

Jack’s entire body tensed. No! Fear had nothing to do with why he wasn’t sticking his nose in North and Tooth’s problems! He just… they didn’t want any help, right? Otherwise they would have assembled the team and Bunny wouldn’t be sulking like some morose artist.

He couldn’t force himself on them if they didn’t want him to.

_Look at all that denial._

“SHUT UP!” he screamed, burying his face in his knees.

“…Jack?”

“I SAID SHUT UP!”

“Jack!”

The ringing, the vile thoughts, and his heart all stopped dead the moment Jack whirled and saw Bunny standing in the doorway.

_Good work_ , his thoughts applauded.

Swallowing hard, Jack’s eyes briefly flickered to North’s railway. He noticed that Yves’s crow was nowhere in sight and sighed.

“You all good, Jack?”

Jack tried giving Bunny the brightest smile he could manage, and felt, for a moment, like all he ever did was lie to the Pooka. “Just talking to the voices,” he joked, swirling a finger around his head.

But Bunny didn’t find it funny in the least. “Have you seen Sandy, mate? He might be able to… help.”

Jack felt the room’s temperature drop, if only slightly. “Help with what?” His voice was cold, almost sharp, and even though he hadn’t meant to sound so hostile, apparently it was enough to evaporate the rest of Bunny’s patience with him.

The Pooka frowned at his tone, and looked like he was going to say something wounding, something that would turn Jack’s stomach inside out with guilt. But then he shut his mouth and reconsidered.

“Never mind,” was his eventual reply, and without another word, he turned and left the office.

_Now look at what you’ve done._

Before Jack could snap at that, the crow descended from wherever it had been hiding and flew down to land on his bent knee.

“I ain’t dead yet,” he informed the bird. With the skull nestled in the flesh of his palm, having been somehow instinctively kept there by his thumb, a finger crept out to rub the feathers on the underside of the crow’s chin. The bird raised its head so Jack could get better access, and the spirit felt a little calmer as he ran the tip of his finger over the soft black feathers. “I like you guys better when you’re little.”

The crow eyed him, and when Jack detected a hint of sharp indignation in those black eyes, he gingerly removed his finger in case it got bitten off.

He dislodged the bird when he got to his feet, and the crow flapped around the room until Jack spun his staff around so it rested on his shoulder. It circled back around Jack’s head and perched on the curve of the warped wood.

Jack peered at it. “You’re tagging along?”

_You’re leaving?!_ his thoughts roared.

Jack scowled at the onslaught of sound. He had never received orders well (despised them, in fact) and he took fucking mind games even worse. “Of course I’m leaving.” He laughed, cold and hollow and harsh enough to draw the room into a brittle chill. “You think I’m that easy to manipulate? I’m gonna walk out of this place and find Pitch so we can skip hand in hand over to Yves’s house and all of us villains are going to do a bunch of villainy shit and the day is going to be great.”

His thoughts had no reply to that, and Jack smirked at the silence in his head.

Meanwhile, the crow was looking down at him like an unamused king glaring at a madman ranting in his court. Jack received the bird’s judgement, acknowledged it, and promptly ignored it. He slipped out of North’s office and started for one of the many windows in his foyer.

_Boom. Boom. Boom._

The thunderous knocks had Jack pausing at the top of the stairs, and just as he was considering asking the winds if there was some turbulent not-at-all-safe-for-flying weather happening outside, a frazzled North suddenly came stomping toward the huge front doors.

_Someone’s visiting North?_ Jack thought as he began backing up. _I’ve never heard anyone knock before. Usually they all just turn up in his office unannounced._

The crow, unnerved by the noise, made a sound of discontent – a _loud_ sound of discontent, which seemed to echo so painfully loudly throughout the large foyer. Cursing, Jack flattened himself against the floor as North’s head swung up toward the balcony.

“Ugh, get in here,” he whispered, struggling with the bird, which was currently trying to lunge at his eyes with its claws. “Get in here you damn bird.”

Shoving the bird up the front of his – new – hoodie, Jack let it wriggle around under the cold material until it was able to poke its black beak out the top of the neck, just under Jack’s chin.

“Now shut up,” he whispered as he heard North crack the giant door open and address whoever was waiting outside.

The voice that replied was stiff, deep, and utterly unrecognizable.

“Nicholas St. North, we are here on behalf of the Faerie Imperial Court,” they announced in a monotone. “We’d like to ask you a few questions, if you have the time.”

Jack scowled at their tone. They weren’t asking North for his time, they were _demanding_ it of him with a well phrased statement and an unwavering tone. He curled back until he could see through the gap between the balcony’s panel and its hand rail, and Jack clutched at the bird in his clothing when he saw the people swarming North.

_So many masks_ , he thought as his eyes raked over several matt black ovals of porcelain all staring North down with varying quantities of eye holes.

“They look super creepy,” Jack murmured to himself. “But not dangerous, at least.” The only one who seemed to be armed was standing on the edge of the group, the silver handle of a sword gleaming right in Jack’s eyes. Unless the rest were packing heat under those dark robes of theirs, then North would be able to take them, right? Jack flickered his gaze to the owner of the Workshop and noted, a tad relieved, that North’s swords were securely at his waist.

The questions of the masked mob were short, curt, and vague to the point that Jack was left wondering whether North’s semi-confused answers were actually being of any use to them. The general gist seemed to flow toward a faerie realm that has lost communications to the Imperial court, but the more they seemed to realise that North was altogether uninterested in (and thus ignorant about) fae politics, the more fidgety the group grew.

Then suddenly the questions stopped, and the leader looked down at a list in their gloved hands. “Do you know the whereabouts of Jack Frost?”

Jack went utterly still.

North pulled back from the crowd a little, and stated, to Jack’s immense relief, “No.”

The fae with the shiny sword considered North for a moment, before saying in a deep voice, “If you see Jack Frost, let him know we want to talk to him.”

“I will,” North said with a smile on his face that was so fake it hurt Jack to look at.

Jack sank back down to the floor as North slammed the great door shut, the mass of wood rattling on its hinges under the force of North’s swing. The feathers atop the crow’s head tickled Jack’s throat as the bird wiggled, manoeuvring itself deeper into Jack’s hoodie so it could escape its material prison.

Jack just let the bird squirm as he stared at nothing in particular, worrying his staff with the tips of his fingers.

_Look who’s in trouble. The fae Imperials want to_ talk _to you._

Jack didn’t appreciate one ounce of the panic that dribbled into his throat. “They also clearly wanted to have a chat with North.”

_But North doesn’t have a rap sheet quite like yours, does he?_

The staff creaked under Jack’s fingers, and he felt tiny splinters dig into his flesh, almost like the wood was trying to defend itself against him.

A huge red shadow suddenly loomed over Jack’s form, and the frost spirit jumped to his feet in fright at the sight of North and his surprised expression. Grabbing onto the bird tucked into his chest to make sure it didn’t try anything hasty, Jack backed up a pace or two.

The two Guardians stared at each other for a few moments, Jack’s deer-in-the-headlight expression causing North’s eyes softening in gradual increments.

“You overheard?” North guessed, the ends of his striped headband flapping over his shoulder as a slight breeze blew in from the windows.

_What a polite way of asking if I’d been eavesdropping._

Embarrassed, Jack nodded meekly. “Uh, yeah. Most of it.” He looked over the balcony, down to the door that was securely locked once again. In a quiet voice, he asked, “Why do they want to talk to me?”

And unsettling look converged in North’s eyes, and just as Jack’s panic began to rise at the sight of it, the expression was gone and North was shrugging with his hands. “Faeries like them, they wish to intimidate people with face masks and sinister little eyeholes. They are… unsettling, in their work habits. Some even smell lies.”

Jack nodded slowly at the warning, keeping in mind that North hadn’t actually answered his question. But then panic suddenly flared in his chest. “But you just lied to them about me!”

To Jack’s surprise, North’s eyes widened in innocence. “They asked for your whereabouts. I do not know where you could have been. The attic, the basement, with Bunny. You could have been anywhere.”

Jack laughed a little. “You’re devious, North.”

“I protect my friends.”

His throat tightened.

North shrugged, like he just spouted that heroic friendship sentimental stuff on a daily basis. “But they are from the Court, and fae laws say very specifically that they must play nice. So they will not be hurting you, Jack.”

As much as he wanted to believe it for the sake of his own anxiety, Jack didn’t know whether to take North’s word on that one. Obviously the Imperials were not pacifists, and if faced with a potential danger – such as Skreek in his scorned form – they clearly didn’t pull their punches. Would the same be applied to him if he gave them the wrong answers to their questions?

_They’ll likely just drag you back to the Court and throw your ass in their dungeons._

The very idea of a dark cell had fear digging through his shoulder blades and threading trembling fingers into his veins.

He couldn’t deal with the dark. The cramped space. The absence of freedom. Couldn’t deal with that _at all_.

Neither could he handle being inside anymore, and so without meeting North’s gaze, Jack skirted around the Russian and headed for a partly-opened window. He needed outside. _Now_.

A firm, warm, kind hand landed on his shoulder and Jack nearly screamed. He looked back and saw the earnest gaze of North fall upon him, and every inch of Jack’s skin started to crawl.

“We are here for you if you need us, Jack.”

Pain lanced through his abdomen, guilt and panic and fear splitting and stabbing and piercing.

_Their kindness is wasted on someone like you._

Jack eased out of the gentle touch with the last of his remaining composure.

_Do I even have any composure?_ he wondered absently. He couldn’t even tell what kind of expression he was wearing at the moment. Was it bad? Was that why North was looking at him like he was on the verge of ordering Jack to stay in the Workshop? Or was that just because he was starting to shake?

“I’ll get out of your hair, North,” he croaked, eyes dropping from the Russian as he started for the windows again. Freedom. Outside. “Deadline and everything.”

He started running before North could try and stop him again, and was already at the large plated windows by the time North uttered a concerned, “Travel safe, Jack.”

But Jack barely heard him. Barely registered the kind words being sent his way. All he knew was the guilt in his chest, the itching of his skin, his claustrophobia pressing in, made a fraction worse by the squirming bird against his chest.

When he was finally out the Workshop window and able to breathe again, the crow wrestled its way out of Jack’s hoodie and flapped off into the wintery distance. After a brief scan of the horizon to check for those masked fae, the frost spirit summoned a chilling wind and trailed along behind the crow, working through the pain in his abdomen as he let Winter’s winds pour around him.

 

Yves’s feathered minion led Jack to a thicket of woods roaring with activity.

And by roaring, he meant screaming.

Distinctly _equine_ screaming.

“Are you trying to get me killed?” Jack muttered, eyeballing a shifty looking shadow off to his right. “Are you trying to get _yourself_ killed? You know these things can fly, right?”

But the bird was a true demon in feathered form, and apparently feared not the wrath of Pitch’s brood of horses. Jack, naturally, was not as fearless of the Nightmares making their presence very known in these woods, and if not for the fact that he was led here by a crow who would see him murdered before he bailed, he most definitely would have been hightailing it by now.

_The Nightmares were made well, after all_ , he thought, eyes darting to follow the trail of another shadow streaking through the trees.

The crow began to make an unnecessary amount of noise, cawing in all directions (probably in hopes that the Nightmares would be drawn to the sound and come scare Jack to death so the crow could finally eat him). Just as Jack had turned to the bird to tell it to shut up, a heavy weight crashed into Jack’s shoulder blades, and he had literally two seconds to die on the inside as he face-planted it on the forest floor before he felt tiny familiar feet dancing around on his back.

“Holy shit,” he hissed, pushing himself up and bucking the tiny spirit off in the process.

The small grinning face came into Jack’s view, neck bent over so its head was upside down and practically touching its torso, and Jack grimaced at the weird thing.

“Look, I’m sorry I left you behind the other day. Are you done being mad at me yet?” he asked, hoping that the thing hadn’t rocked up for a repeat of the other night.

The spirit didn’t reply, as usual, but it did seem to be substantially less creepy than it had been on Halloween. As it danced around by Jack’s head, it seemed to be happy at least, lacking any of its intense I’m-going-to-stare-at-Jack-until-he-breaks aura, and Jack took that as a good sign.

A muffled _caw caaw_ was returned from the trees ahead of them, and Jack’s guide perked up and flew off in search for what Jack supposed was its partner in crime.

“Must be where Pitch is,” he muttered. “Do you think if I ask nicely, he’ll tell the Nightmares not to eat me?” he asked the spirit with a little half-laugh.

The spirit straightened up and began skipping after the crow. Jack picked himself up off the dried leaves and, brushing himself off, reluctantly followed. “Yeah, probably not.”

Another Nightmare scream filled the air, but before Jack could panic for the sake of his own ass, the terrifying sound was followed by a groan of pain.

A _familiar_ groan of pain.

Jack’s paced increased.

When he spotted a milling gathering of Nightmares, he swung himself up into the tree canopies and had to sit his ass down on a branch at the sight of the battle scene happening below him.

Pitch, as tall and lithe and well-formed as always, had his back against a tree as four Nightmares advanced on him. His forehead was knit, shoulders hunched and beads of sweat rolled down his face as he eyed off the sand horses stomping over the bodies of their fallen brethren to get to him.

Not to mention he was wielding a giant, hulking scythe that was all grey and black and… honestly, looking a little worse for wear as a shard of metal cracked off the blade and fell by Pitch’s boot.

But Pitch was too preoccupied to notice the decaying state of his weapon – which was concerning in itself – and the scythe swung powerfully, the Nightmare King drawing on whatever incredible set of muscles he’d have to have stored in his shoulder blades to be able to throw a weapon that large around so effortlessly.

Jack gnawed on his cheek as he watched the scythe tear through a single Nightmare before shadows exploded from the blade and Pitch had to hoist the weapon back onto his shoulder with a grunt.

_It seems to be malfunctioning_ , he mused. Not that he had much experience with faulty weapons, since his staff was only really a channel for whatever sass Boreas felt like giving him that day.

The Nightmares advanced further and further on Pitch, their sleek, sand bodies shifting as though the bones and muscles beneath the surface of the sand were real. Jack watched as Pitch swung again, this time just to ward them back, and one got close enough on Pitch’s side to snap at his coat.

_Shit_.

There were so many things wrong with this scene, Jack didn’t even know where to begin.

So he decided to open his mouth instead.

“You need a hand?” he called down.

The Nightmare King, however great and fearful, actually flinched at the sound of Jack’s voice, and when Pitch swung a glare up at him, the frost spirit donned a smirk that he wasn’t too sure was genuine or not. He loved the idea of catching Pitch off-guard, the irony of it just made his veins _sing_ , but he was also bitterly aware that alone in a dark room Pitch had essentially told him to pack up his friendliness and fuck off.

But, well, this situation couldn’t really be helped, right? Jack had to deliver Pitch to Skreek for better or worse, and he couldn’t really do that if Pitch had been mauled to death by his cavalry, could he?

No. He couldn’t.

So he was just gonna have to endure whatever assholish remarks Pitch was gonna dish out.

“This makes my stomach hurt,” he mumbled to himself, pressing the heel of his hand into the flat planes of his abdomen.

_Serves you right, idiotic rat._

“I didn’t fucking ask you,” he growled, fist clenching at the material of his hoodie.

Down on the ground, one of the last three Nightmares dove right for Pitch. He evaded with a graceful roll – made somewhat less graceful by the big ass scythe he was lugging around – and turned back to slash the Nightmare in half.

“No I do not, Frost,” Pitch ground out as he faced off with the last remaining Nightmare. Jack wondered, absently, where the other one had gone.

He cleaved up on a swing that should have finished the sand horse, but just as the scythe pierced Nightmare’s sand body, the entire weapon fractured in Pitch’s grip. Shadows poured out of the blade violently, and what was left of the silver metal was flung off into the trees in three pieces. One came slicing toward Jack, cutting through the air so fast Jack’s heart didn’t have time to skip a beat before he flattened himself against his branch, narrowly saving himself from losing his head.

He glanced back at Pitch in time to see the Nightmare King curse the broken weapon black and blue before taking out the Nightmare before him with the handle alone, having to get so close to the animal that the horse got a good bite into Pitch’s shoulder before he managed to slay it.

Concerned, although reason dictated that he seriously shouldn’t have been, Jack stood on his branch, half inclined to drop down and see if Pitch’s arm was going to drop off. Shadows were leaking out of the wound Pitch had a large, grey hand firmly clamped over, and by the pinched expression on his face, Jack assumed he was in a great deal of pain.

He was about to shout down at Pitch – something helpful, maybe to offer him a Band-Aid or something – when a black figure began rising behind Pitch, and Jack’s next sentence turned into, “Look out!”

Pitch turned just in time to come face to face with a Nightmare that was notably bigger than the others. Smoke snorted out of its nose as it dragged its hoof along the wet dirt, and Pitch reached behind him for the handle of his scythe. But Jack could see that a piece of wood would do shit all against a Nightmare that big, and just as the thing lunged for Pitch, Jack blasted it with a shock of cold. The sand shattered into splinters that rained down around Pitch, who just turned, slowly, and looked up at Jack with an expression that was unfathomable save for the pain lancing through his eyes.

Jack gravitated forward, almost instinctively, but then Pitch’s mouth opened, and Jack’s concern was devoured by sheer anger.

“Why do you keep turning up?” Pitch, the man he had just _saved_ , bitched.

Despite the fact that he had expected this treatment, he expected nothing else _but_ this treatment, Jack’s heart still burned with absolute fury. “Well fuck you too,” he snapped, so angry that Pitch’s gaze went from irritated to oddly focused in an instant. “I’ll have you know that I got an invitation to the ball as well, and my invitation told me to come get you because you’d likely ignore yours.”

To make his point, Jack jabbed a finger over to the tree opposite the one he was dangling out of, at the two crows apparently having a great time cawing and preening at each other.

When Pitch looked over at the birds, he considered both for a long moment before he started laughing. An insane sort of laughter, that rang with more pain than joy, but still laughter.

Jack raised an eyebrow at the man as he collapsed onto the ground, groaning and laughing and clutching his shoulder in agony.

Grimacing at the scene, Jack dropped out of his tree, landing on the dry forest floor. Behind him, the little spirit had been trying all throughout the fight to climb the _vertical_ tree trunk to sit with Jack, and finally gave up its endeavour when it saw that Jack was on solid ground once again. It hurried to Jack’s side and he tried not to be relieved at the fact that it no longer seemed to hate his guts.

“I suppose you don’t owe me that favour anymore.”

Without thinking, Jack snorted at Pitch’s sudden humility. “After your big bad speech the other day?”

Pitch craned his neck to stare Jack dead in the face for a moment. Then the head dropped again, and he struggled to his feet. “Fine then. The favour stands.”

Hold up, _what_? “Wait, no –”

Pitch turned to him, smirking, and Jack thought, _What an absolute shithead._

Gathering his stick like some old man’s cane, Pitch began wandering off into the forest. Jack chanced a look at the crows above him, and when they both turned to follow the Nightmare King (and the little spirit all but tripped over itself in its effort to chase after him) Jack sighed and trailed along behind the entourage.

Making sure to avoid stepping on the splattered remains of the Nightmares, he cleared his throat and earned a sharp look from Pitch. “So… the Nightmares still hate you?”

Pitch exhaled a heavy, pained breath. “I am still dealing with a mutiny, yes.”

_That bite must really hurt, huh?_ “Seems to be going well for them.”

Pitch didn’t answer, didn’t so much as sneer at him, and Jack’s eyes grazed over the wound he was still clutching. His anger foolishly waned as he watched the shadows waft from beneath the collar of Pitch’s coat. “Want me to ice that?” he offered quietly.

The wounded shoulder was rolled, testing it, and Pitch’s frown deepened. “The cold won’t heal it.”

“I’m not saying it will. It’ll numb it though, and at least it’ll stop hurting.”

Pitch shook his head. “The pain’s fine.”

“Are you –?”

“Frost,” he warned, cutting Jack a look that had his hands rising in surrender.

_Ungrateful_ , his thoughts hissed, and Jack’s raised hands balled into fists.

Unfortunately, his head had a point. A point that made Jack just want to punch the guy in the face.

“Oh, by the way, thank you for saving my ass back there, Jack,” he grumbled to himself as he watched Pitch’s hunched back proceed ahead of him. “Yeah, no problems Pitch, just tryna be of service.”

Then a thought occurred to him. “Hey, why do you keep calling me Frost?”

Pitch squinted back at Jack suspiciously. “Why are you bringing that up now?”

“It keeps bothering me. Can’t you use my normal name like everyone else?” Well, nearly everyone else. Phoenix did insist on using his surname way too much for Jack’s liking, but he was an idiot and arguing with an idiot was a lost cause. “There are people who hate me even more than you do who call me by my given name, so, like, you don’t have to worry about skirting too close to the friend zone by using it.”

The look in Pitch’s eyes was considering. Pained, but thoughtful at least. “And if I simply do not wish to?”

_If that’s your only objection…_

Jack stopped, a twig breaking under his heel, and to his bleak surprise Pitch stopped with him when he noticed. “Call me Jack,” he said firmly, meeting Pitch’s eyes and refusing to let the bastard look away.

_“Stop addressing me as what the Moon turned me into,”_ rested on the tip of his tongue, so close to becoming sound that Jack’s mouth had parted slightly to prepare the air for its dispersion. But he quickly locked his jaw shut against the words he knew he couldn’t – _couldn’t_ – utter aloud.

When he noticed the tiny pull of Pitch’s mouth, a miniscule twitch that was almost a smile, Jack’s heart stuttered in his chest.

“If that’s what you want, _Jack_.”

_“Jack. Jack, look at me.”_

The stuttering in his heart turned into an aching pang, and the second Pitch turned away from him, Jack put a hand to his chest, a confused – but pleased – smile growing on his own face.

Yeah, that’s definitely what he wanted.

_You’re deranged and pathetic._

The smile slipped away. “Nobody asked you,” he grumbled.

The door to Kitrashin was hovering ridiculously close by (which made Jack think that Pitch had carefully planned his time away from the office) and the Emporium was the busiest Jack had ever seen it – which, truly, wasn’t saying much. Three new stallholders sat in their respective arches, and on the other side of the room Jack could see a blond customer in a hat talking to those gurgling herb ladies.

Pitch made an instant beeline for a goggled individual sitting amongst racks and racks of weapons, and despite his armed position, Jack decided that he looked like the friendliest stallholder in the room. The other two unfamiliar faces – a slinking, translucent gecko-looking spirit who was walking all over the bookcases, occasionally adjusting his glasses and hissing, and a scaly lizard man with a pin between sharpened teeth and a half-made shoe in his claws – looked decidedly less than kind.

A point proved, a moment later, when the man trying to buy herbs from the herbalists accidently backed up a little too far into the shoemaker’s space, and a positively terrifying snarl resounded from the lizard’s throat.

Even Pitch grimaced at the sound of it.

_Super glad I don’t need shoes._

The goggled man surrounded by shiny weaponry glanced up when Pitch entered the scene, and his eyes landed on the bladeless weapon handle Pitch was carrying.

“Damn,” he said with next to no emotion. “I thought this time it would work for sure.”

Pitch put the wood on the counter and glared at it. “The blade itself lasted longer than many of the others. But not long enough.”

“ _Kaboom_ ,” Jack muttered, remembering the explosion of shadows. The little spirit at his side jumped excitedly at the use of onomatopoeia, and Jack smirked down at the ghostly thing as one of the crows floated down and perched itself in the wiry hairs on the spirit’s head. Its head tipped a little at the weight, and suddenly the spirit’s entire being was overcome with the need to see what had landed on its head (and probably try to eat it).

The other crow, sitting atop Jack’s staff, cawed indignantly at its partner as the spirit ran off in a panic.

“You brought a friend this time, Pitch?”

Jack slid a curious look over to the man Pitch was engaged with, and noted that dull brown eyes had lit with a speckle of interest at the sight of him.

Pitch groaned audibly. “Ignore him.”

_How rude_ , Jack thought with a narrowed glance. The goggled man, a weapon smith Jack assumed, rolled his eyes up at Pitch and said, “Ooh hoo someone’s looking bitter.”

Jack snorted. “He always looks like that.”

The smith gave Jack an easy-going look. “Oh, I know. What’s your name kid?”

Irked at being called a kid – he was _three hundred_ years old for fuck’s sake – Jack held his chin a little higher and proudly stated his name before his attention was snagged by some green-glowing weapons hanging on a wooden rack. He curiously wandered over to them.

Out of the corner of his vision, though, Jack noticed the smith’s easy expression fade into something more pensive, his eyes never wavering from Jack. It was all Jack could do not to leap behind one of the weapon racks just to get out of his line of sight.

Pitch cleared his throat, mercifully drawing the smith’s attention with the sound. “Do you have any other metal that might work?” he asked impatiently.

“We’re running out of options, Pitch. Your shadows are so abrasive the metal shatters before they can even bond properly. I don’t know what kind of miracle you’re expecting from me, but mixing otherworldly magic with earthly materials is usually beyond the skill of anyone like me.”

Jack listened in interest as the two began to bicker about magical disparities and “it shouldn’t matter if it’s otherworldly magic can’t you just make the damn metal yield already” while he kept his eyes on the green flames emanating from the short swords in front of him. Enchanted weapons were always the coolest – his own staff being a keen and very biased example.

As he was basking, though, Jack felt a sharp, scratching pain run down the side of his neck and over his collarbone. He grabbed at his skin in case it was some devastatingly creepy Emporium-born bug, and when his hands felt nothing but smooth skin, when the cutting pain heightened, Jack felt his heart decide to take a moment to seize.

Blond hair out of the corner of his eye drew Jack’s vision, and his head went light when he saw a black ribbon tied in a knot at the back of the man’s neck.

_It can’t be._

_It can’t be._

_It isn’t_ , his thoughts pushed, deciding not be an asshole for once. _Take another look._

He spun on the force of his panic, nearly falling, and a pained gurgle involuntarily worked its way up his throat. Caught by the sound, the man paused and turned back, probably too see who was dying (or at least tyring to emulate the herbalists over in the corner).

Jack’s breath gushed out of his lungs at the sight of the man’s face – at his pointed nose reserved for the blood of fae aristocracy, at the slant of his eyes and the shimmering gold scales around them. At the fact that not one single feature was familiar.

_Not him_ , his thoughts pointed out.

“Yeah,” Jack breathed, beyond relieved, as the man simply gave him a once-over and left the Emporium.

“Hey, Jack Frost. Come here a sec.”

Flinching at the sound of his name, Jack looked over at the two men to his left and noticed with a grimace that both were staring at him. The smith’s eyes were wide and his expression open but completely empty, whereas Pitch was staring straight at Jack’s chest with a look so intense Jack barely had a chance to try and read it before he felt like buckling under it.

He ran his hand over his chest, catching Pitch’s eye with the movement, and mercifully the Nightmare King’s eyes rose briefly before skittering away.

“I never had this kind of shit when I spent my days chilling with children,” he muttered to himself as he hesitantly stepped over to the counter.

_Then maybe it’s time for a change of pace._

The thought was calm, providing a suggestion rather than a demand, and it was enticing to the point that Jack’s eyes actually flickered over to the doorway.

But then the crow on his staff cawed down at him, as if sensing his wavering resolve, and Jack remembered the tiny skull in his pocket and the purpose he had gained for the day.

_We have to see Skreek first_ , he told himself firmly.

Over the counter, the smith gestured toward his staff. “Can I take a look at your staff, kid? You can keep holding it if you want.”

With a brief look at Pitch (who was frowning at nothing in particular while he massaged his fingers into his leaking shoulder), Jack dislodged the crow with a rough shake and held out the wood to the smith. Adjusting a dial on the side of his goggles – which made his eyes horrifyingly larger – the smith examined the woodwork of the staff, laying one hand near Jack’s to steady the material.

“Can you power it up for me?”

“It’ll hurt you if you keep your hand on it,” Jack warned.

The smith waved his concern off with his free hand. “I’ll be fine. Just do your thing.”

Shrugging, Jack drew the cold into the staff, causing the twists in the wood to burn a brilliant blue. In his periphery, Jack noticed Pitch’s gaze slide over in their direction as frost curled up his fingers, tickling his skin. The smith’s hand started to turn a freezing shade of purple.

After a moment of careful scrutiny, the smith released his hold with a crack of his icy-stiff joints. Jack drew his staff back to his chest and the crow resumed its perch on the arch, giving Jack a peeved look for throwing it off in the first place.

“Whoever made this used the same idea I am,” the smith said to Pitch as he flexed out his frozen hand. “His frost flows through wood like life through veins. It’s seamless. But it was once living material. Your shadows are so thick they keep cracking apart the metals. We could try a more direct approach with wood, but the blade will never be as sharp. Plus your shadows don’t seem to ever want to meld with the handles I make for you.”

“Uh.” Four eyes, two still unnervingly enlarged, swung to Jack. “No one made this.”

“Huh?”

He ran his fingers over the staff nervously. “It was just a stick. I put my frost through it and it’s, well, it’s a stick that fell into the lake with me when I….”

_Died._

_Drowned._

_Lost everything._

_Saved your sister,_ a stronger voice chimed in.

“Changed,” Jack settled on.

The smith hummed. “You got any sticks with sentimental value, Pitch?”

“No,” Pitch stated blandly.

“Any materials that have been exposed for altogether too long to your shadows? What about anything in your lair?”

“There was a lot of metal down there,” Jack piped in, earning a withering look from the owner of said lair. “Why are you looking at me like that? It’s not like you use those cages or that globe anymore, right? Unless you threw out all your world-domination stuff in a depressed rage.”

Pitch’s eye twitched, actually twitched, and Jack couldn’t help but feel a little smug at seeing the guy tick. He smirked at Pitch’s reaction, offering a silent response of, _You wanted us_ not _to be friendly, right?_

Pitch rolled his eyes up and away from Jack’s expression. “I _can’t_ get it,” he ground out.

The smith didn’t seem deterred in the least by Pitch’s attitude. “Just tell me whereabouts in that evil lair the oldest metal is and I’ll have it fetched.”

Pitch’s eyes settled on the smith. “I don’t want you going through my residence.”

Jack groaned. He honestly felt like smacking some sense into Pitch and screaming at him to stop being such a child. A moment later he groaned at himself, horrified that he was being forced to exercise reasonable adult reactions twice in one day.

The smith shrugged. “When you stop being a bitch, let me know if you want my assistance.”

Jack cracked up at the smith’s blunt response, smothering his face into his staff as his shoulders shook. The dark glare of the Nightmare King reflected right off his mirthful laughter, and Pitch’s _utterly_ unimpressed aura was so oppressive it had the complete opposite effect on Jack and the spirit practically collapsed on the ground in hysterics.

With some discriminate grumbling, Pitch stomped over Jack’s convulsing body and headed over to his own counter while Jack tried to recollect his composure. His crow swooped down to eye-level, probably checking, once again, if he was ripe for eating or not.

Shooing the bird away with his hand, Jack watched, half a smile still on his face, as Pitch dug through the draws on the desk, his right hand still clamped to his left shoulder. Eventually, he pulled out some bandages and the rest of Jack’s smile slipped off his face.

He didn’t even have enough energy to heal his own wounds?

“Hopefully Skreek doesn’t want him to do anything disgustingly difficult,” Jack uttered to himself.

_Might get lucky. Maybe the asshole will summon a bad batch of shadows and poof right out of existence with them._

Jack’s eyebrows dropped. “Cram it.”

“I’ve heard stories about you, Jack Frost,” the smith suddenly said. Yanked from his train of thought, Jack stiffened, his eyes growing a little wider, and Pitch frowned over at him just as Jack rose his own eyes to the smith’s. The smith added languidly, “But you seem a lot warmer in person.”

_What a joke_.

A noise that was meant to be a laugh fluttered from Jack’s mouth, the sound raw and filled with the tuneless strum of too-taut nerves. He didn’t know how to reply. Was he meant to thank the smith? Apologise? Climb onto the table and choke the goggled man until he couldn’t remember ever meeting Jack?

As Jack’s mind whirled, Pitch wandered back and not-so-gently introduced his boot to Jack’s thigh. Jack flinched at the contact, and when his eyes rose to Pitch, he saw that the Nightmare King had his body faced slightly away from Jack. But his eyes were glued to the smaller spirit, the swirl of gold in his irises flickering as they held each other’s attention.

Then Pitch jerked his chin up, almost imperceptibly so. Jack got to his feet as if he was being drawn by a string.

The smith watched their exchange without a word, before he pulled a CD case from beneath his desk and placed it beside Pitch’s broken weapon. He looked at Pitch. “They say music is meant to stimulate the emotions. I’m not sure what was stimulated while listening to this modern stuff, but sadly it wasn’t anything invigorating.”

Pitch seemed to extract something meaningful from that statement, and straightened. “Did you want payment for this last scythe now?”

But the smith waved him off. “You look dead on your feet as it is, Pitch. Frighten a few children and I’ll take compensation off you when this next weapon is ready.”

Pitch nodded once, looking a little relieved – if Jack’s eyes weren’t deceiving him (which they well could be, considering the shit they’d just pulled with that blond man). Giving Jack a look that barked the order of “we’re leaving _now_ ” nearly as well as words could have, Pitch turned and headed for the stairs.

Jack followed after him, not because of the authority Pitch was trying to exercise over him, but because for once the Nightmare King didn’t try to strut off without him (a fact that pleased Jack just a tiny bit). And, of course, Jack had to drag him to Yves’s somehow, and exiting the Emporium in the same quarter of the world as Pitch would certainly make that task easier.

On the first step of the stairwell, Jack turned back and called, “Hey, we’re leaving!” throughout the store.

“You could just leave it behind,” Pitch mumbled behind him.

Jack poked his tongue out at Pitch in response, and waited in the archway until the little creature popped its head – crow still attached and alive, thank god – out from behind the kitsune statute and frantically hurried over to Jack. The frost spirit turned once his little companion was by his side, and followed Pitch out of the Emporium, painfully aware that their departure was being watched by two overly large eyes.

Outside, the air was cool and the dirt beneath Jack’s feet icy and compacted. Crystals of frozen water hung off branches overhead, and the distinct sound of traffic could be heard just off in the distance.

Absently wondering if the doorway had an agenda when it picked its places to teleport to, or if it just whimsically chose the next location without much thought, Jack used a brief gust of wind to whisk himself up on top of his own staff. Balancing (precariously, but skilfully, since he was totally too awesome to fall) on the curve of the wood, Jack reached up and snapped a giant icicle off the underside of the lowest branch he could reach.

_It’s so sharp I could strap it to the end of my staff like a blade_ , he thought, turning the smooth, cold crystal over in his hands.

A loud _caw_ right in his earhole stunned Jack out of his fantasy, and he dropped the icicle in fright. Dropping onto a crouch so he didn’t go flying off his staff, he sent the crow perched above him a dry look as the icicle landed, sharp tip down, buried in the cold dirt. The little spirit came running over to inspect what Jack had dropped, and the crow still on its head seemed just as fascinated.

Jack glanced over at where he’d left Pitch, and jerked a little when he realised the Nightmare King was already looking straight at him. The door to Kitrashin was gone.

He raised his chin a little higher at the scrutinising stare, and couldn’t quite decide if he appreciated Pitch’s sudden focus on him or not. “What are you staring at?” he asked, worry prickling his skin.

“You got new clothes,” the Nightmare King observed blandly.

It took every ounce of Jack’s willpower not to keel over at the remark. He had no idea if it was meant as a compliment or some kind of super subtle insult, but Jack found himself pleased that Pitch had taken enough time out of his gloomy mood to take notice of him.

_A true Christmas miracle._

But, even if it was an insult, his clothes truly were deserving of acknowledgement. Or, at least Jack was, what with the ordeal he had to go through to steal them. Usually he just blew a sharp breeze past a clothing shop or lifted the odd piece of clothing off a person carrying in their washing. But no matter how hard Jack searched, he couldn’t find a single piece of clothing he liked enough that was also precariously exposed to the elements.

And so he’d had little choice but to brain a guy walking down a deserted street and steal the clothes on his back with the help of an ice- slick piece of pavement and some well-placed winds.

_Little choice?_

Jack ignored the snarky thought in favour of swinging back down to ground level and smoothing his hands over his new hoodie. It was a darker blue than his old hoodie, and had the coolest white rings around one of the arms. He’d also managed to snag a long-sleeved white top to wear underneath just in case something unfortunate (i.e. Phoenix) happened to his hoodie again.

Hand on the ties at his throat, Jack battered his eyelashes at the Nightmare King. “Awh, Pitch, you noticed,” he teased. “I had to jump a guy in an alley to get these. Boreas was seething at me through his winds for a solid three hours afterwards. But it was totally worth it.”

Pitch’s eyes pinched a little, in curiosity or perhaps amusement, but neither reaction touched his mouth, and it kind of disappointment Jack a little. He wanted to see that smile again, that quirk of the lip Pitch had shown Jack earlier, or even that radiant thing he’d pulled out of his ass when he and Skreek and been fucking each other with compliments in Yves’s sitting room.

“Although they’re not as warm as your coat,” Jack added with a little pout, eyes on Pitch’s face, waiting for another reaction.

Pitch’s brow tensed a fraction, and the man’s eyes dropped, for the barest moment, to the fingers Jack had curled over the neck of the hoodie. Jack’s hand twitched under the Nightmare King’s heavy gaze, and Pitch’s eyes rose over Jack’s throat, his face, to level an intense stare on the frost spirit. “You can’t have my coat,” Pitch said stiffly, and Jack was reminded, for one flash of a moment, of a dog growling off a potential suitor for its favourite bone.

Jack exhaled a giggle and dropped his hand back to his staff. “You should see your face.”

Affronted, Pitch glared at the frost spirit. “What’s wrong with my face?”

“Not telling,” he laughed.

“Frost,” Pitch growled.

Jack just raised an eyebrow at him silently. Pitch sighed, groaned almost, and amended, “ _Jack_.”

Satisfied, Jack smiled and tilted his entire body to peer up at the Nightmare King. He looked… petulant, of all things, and Jack found it curious that the big badass had such a childish side. Not just defensive, but full on childish. “You must really like that coat,” Jack teased in a softer tone.

Pitch looked away, and if Jack could guess, he’d assume the man was embarrassed. His fingers tightened on the wound on his shoulder, the shadows of which had nearly stopped leaking thankfully, nails scrapping over the course material Jack had not so long ago been able to run his owns hands over. “I do,” Pitch grunted.

Jack straightened and Pitch glanced back to clock his movements warily. “Thanks again for letting me borrow it,” he said in the warmest tone he could manage. Pitch looked a little startled, but before he could try and cut Jack with a deliberately unfriendly comment, Jack stepped back, out of the atmosphere he had put so much effort in to create. He spun his staff around like it was a dance partner and quickly exchanged his sincerity for a wicked little smile. “It was big and warm and like getting a hug from – well, obviously not you, you miserable prickle,” he said with a playful frown directed at the Nightmare King.

Pitch rolled his eyes at Jack’s sass, and the frost spirit internally sighed.

The ghost spirit jumped at Jack’s feet, as if the little thing wanted a turn to dance with Jack, and the frost spirit laughed down at it and the crow still tenuously gripping its hair. “You don’t like being touched let alone swung around. The waltz definitely ain’t for you, little guy.”

“Do you even get cold?”

Jack twitched a little at the remark, and looked back over at the man wearing a curious expression. Jack turned back around and ran his fingers over his staff softly, the wood glowing under his fingertips. “I’m always cold,” he murmured, and he felt the truth of his answer so deep in his chest it was physically painful.

There was a breath of silence between them, a span of a moment during which Jack was too afraid to turn around, and so pretended to be completely immersed in the undertakings of the tiny ghost spirit running around his feet. And then Pitch blew out a sigh and Jack heard his boots crunch ice-crisp sticks as he wandered past Jack, into his direct line of sight, and over to a boulder nearby.

He sat down heavily on the stone, catching the ghost spirit’s attention and drawing it over to his dark form out of curiosity. Eyeing the little spirit as it came ambling over to him, Pitch muttered something to himself as Jack thumbed his staff silently, before clearing his throat and saying, “I appreciate you interfering in my sparring practice and preventing my untimely decapitation.”

Jack nearly dropped his staff in shock. Was he… was he saying thank you? Seriously? Maybe he was little more decent than Jack had given him credit for. Jack pressed his temple against the now-icy surface of his staff and tried a small smile on the man. “Welcome.”

Pitch immediately looked away. “And…”

“And?”

“And some cold would be nice.”

Jack smile turned into a full grin at the sound of Pitch’s grunted request. “Ha! Knew you’d cave eventually.”

_He’s only cooperating because he wants something from you._

Jack’s grin cracked a little as the thought entered his head, and by the time Pitch had looked back at him, the expression had completely fallen off.

“What’s wrong?”

Jack startled, but headed over to Pitch anyway. “If I help you out here, will you come to Yves’s with us?”

Pitch slid him a look. “You’re cutting a deal?”

“Well. No.” Jack sighed. “I’ll still ice up your shoulder regardless, but make my life easier and come with us, yeah? Skreek isn’t one to ask for help often so something must be seriously wrong.”

Pitch considered him as Jack nudged the ghost spirit out of his way with his foot. Resting his staff against his shoulder and neck, so he had at least one point of skin-on-wood contact with the staff, he accepted the bandage Pitch held out to him as the Nightmare King admitted, “I was planning on accepting the summons anyway. Having the favour of Skreeklavic Shadowbent can only be beneficial.”

_Almost too easy_ , Jack thought as he let his eyes briefly wander over the razor sharp edge of Pitch’s jaw. “To your future reign of terror?” he retorted absently.

Pitch gave him a dry look and pointed to his shoulder as if to say, “Get on with it.”

Jack rolled his eyes and made a gesture toward his coat. “You’re gonna have to take some clothes off, dude. I can’t get to your skin with that coat on.”

With a grunt, Pitch rolled one shoulder out of his beloved garment and wordlessly allowed Jack to take the sleeve of his hurt arm and tug the rest of the coat off. Jack dumped the material in Pitch’s lap, but as soon as he went to pull at the neck of Pitch’s black shirt, the Nightmare King’s hand shot out and grabbed his fingers to stop him.

Jack froze, the warmth of Pitch’s fingers around his frying his brain for a moment. But then Jack noticed the black ink barely visible underneath the neckline of Pitch’s shirt, and he looked at the conflicted expression Pitch was trying to work through.

“Unless you have ‘I Heart Bunnymund’ tattooed on your shoulder, you don’t need to look so concerned.”

Pitch snorted at that, amusement playing around the corner of his eyes, and he eventually let Jack go. “Don’t give me frostbite. Please.”

Jack recoiled at the very idea, but when he saw that the amusement was still present, that Pitch was half joking with him, he relaxed. “Stress less. I have magical fingers.”

A non-committal hum was all he got in response, and Jack pinched the soft material of Pitch’s shirt and drew it back from the skin of his shoulder.

The first thing Jack’s thoughts latched onto were the small stars he was suddenly presented with. The ink around them was dark, infinitely darker than Pitch’s already shady skin tone, but the tiny stars had been left unfilled, small markers of skin that looked suspiciously purple from bruising.

The finest of shadowy mist was still oozing off Pitch’s skin, but other than that the flesh didn’t seem to be broken. Jack handed Pitch back his bandages and took a shallow breath before pressing his fingers against the warm skin at the apex between his neck and shoulder.

Pitch flinched at the contact, shivered at how cold Jack’s skin was, and Jack sighed a little. He hadn’t even begun channelling Winter’s cold yet.

“Cold?” Jack teased with a half-hearted smirk.

Pitch shook his head. “It’s fine.”

“Liar,” Jack murmured, and before Pitch’s head could swing around to look at him, Jack splayed his hand across Pitch’s shoulder and poured cold into the Nightmare King’s skin.

A sound escaped Pitch’s throat that was half agony and half relief, and Jack felt that sound sear through his thighs and all the way down his legs. With a shaky breath, he worked his fingers over the bruised, inked shoulder until any visible flesh was flushed red with cold. The translucent shadows curled from under Jack’s hand as he spread numbness over Pitch’s skin, and he felt like knotting his fingers around their wispy furls and tearing them out of Pitch’s body with a hard yank.

“Why are there shadows here?” Jack asked as his fingers ran down the back of Pitch’s shoulder, tracing the indentation the Nightmare’s teeth had left in his skin.

“They’re healing the wound,” Pitch replied, his voice a little rougher than usual.

_So maybe I shouldn’t tear them out_ , Jack thought as he dragged down the back of Pitch’s shirt a little to make sure the skin he’d been tracing hadn’t turned blue.

His finger stilled, though, when he caught sight of an inch of whatever art was slashed across Pitch’s shoulder blades. Pitch tensed when Jack stopped moving, and the frost spirit quickly left the Nightmare King’s back to spread the cold across his collarbone.

But that tattoo…

It had looked like the corner of the Moon.

Confused, Jack licked his lips and tried not to notice the way Pitch’s head titled a little when Jack pressed his hand into the bony part of his collarbone. “How are your asshole sentiments holdin’ up?”

Pitch tried to glare at him, but Jack’s hand clenched on the yet-to-be frosted portion of his shoulder and Pitch was too busy wheezing to be a dickhead. “I meant what I said the other night,” he eventually croaked.

“Not everyone cares about the great good and evil divide as much as you do.”

This time when Pitch shot him a look, a dark look, Jack simply took it. They stayed like that for a moment, Jack frosting up the last of Pitch’s pain as the Nightmare King watched him with narrowed eyes. But then Pitch’s brow twitched and he surprised Jack by tiredly saying, “Not everyone’s entire existence is defined by it.”

Jack’s eyes shot to the man, and instead of looking away, Pitch held him there with a look that seemed to demand that Jack finally awaken his intelligence and get whatever hint Pitch was trying to ward him off with.

But Jack had never been good at taking hints. Instead, he realised that he should be removing his hand from Pitch before he burnt the man, and did exactly that before his patient could turn around and give him an earful for burning the skin off his shoulder. He poked at the cool flesh and noted that Pitch didn’t even flinch.

“Is it all numb?” he asked, lifting his hand off so Pitch could inspect it himself.

Pitch ran his hand over the surface of his shirt, fingers pressing in and feeling over the shoulder. “Yes. Thank you.”

“Like I said. Magical fingers.” Jack wiggled the mentioned limbs for emphasis, and the little spirit, who had been hopping around entertaining itself while Jack and Pitch had been not-bonding, jumped up to try and snap at the moving fingers.

Jack retracted his hands immediately and poked his tongue out at the spirit. “You ain’t getting these,” he informed the spirit. He shot the crows a similar look. “Neither are you two.”

“You got scared in the Emporium,” Pitch suddenly said.

Jack flinched at the sudden accusation. “The smith –”

“Before that.”

A tiny, minuscule, ball of dread settled in Jack’s stomach. As he took a step back, he kind of wished that Pitch would return to his self-absorbed gloom. “I thought I saw someone,” he muttered, and turned away in hopes that the conversation would be ended with his departure.

But, as usual, the Nightmare King could turn into a bastard at a moment’s notice. “Someone who frightens you?” he called from behind Jack.

Jack was too determined not to have this conversation to concern himself with dissecting Pitch’s tone, although a tiny, surprised, part of him was indicating that there didn’t seem to be anything mocking in Pitch’s voice.

_You’re being foolish. Of course he’s making fun of you._

His throat tightened. But still Jack turned and pulled a leer onto his face that would have made Skreek shed proud tears. “Jealous?” he drawled, and watched as Pitch’s entire body tensed with the sudden change in Jack’s demeanour.

But before the Nightmare King could try and think up some offensive retort to save his own precious dignity, Jack spun and gestured for the crow perched above him to get his ass down to everyone else’s level. The crow took absolutely zero notice of him.

“Is Yves gonna come pick us up, or do we have to get to his place on our own?” he asked the bird, craning his neck to see it.

The crow cawed once, wings ruffling, and its partner flapped off the top of the ghost spirit’s head and went soaring straight for Pitch’s lap. The Nightmare King cursed the bird as it squirmed around in the folds of Pitch’s coat, but before he could shake it out, the bird was twisting out of the material and its head popped up, a tiny skull identical to Jack’s in its beak.

Jack laughed at how put-out Pitch looked as he pulled out his own hissing skull. Above him, the crow made stamping movements with its feet, and Jack gave it a look. “We have to crush them? Is that what you’re saying?”

The crow nodded and Jack looked dubious. “None of Yves’s other skulls have to be broken for transport. Are you sure? What if we break them and he gets really mad at us and we have to give him _our_ skulls as compen–”

But Jack’s worries died the second he saw Pitch rise to his feet (coat gathered in his arms with the crow sitting atop the pile), throw down the tiny ball of bone, and stamp on it with altogether too much force. Dark purple smoke began pouring from beneath Pitch’s shoe and Jack sighed.

_You hate the dark. You hate the dark._

“Stop trying to psych me out,” Jack complained as he tossed his own skull at his feet. The crow once perched above him swooped down to land on Jack’s shoulder and out of the corner of his eye, Jack saw the little ghost spirit hurry to Jack’s side as he brought his staff high and slammed it down into the bone.

A crack, a splinter, and suddenly smoke was pluming and Jack had barely enough time to close his eyes and tighten his grip on his staff before everything tipped sideways once again.

 

The smell of pumpkins and fresh grass hit Jack square in the face, and when he felt talons unclench from his shoulder, Jack ventured to opened his eyes just a little.

He exhaled a relieved breath when he saw Yves’s house before him, the structure still looking as sinister as ever despite the fact that the sky was bright teal and not a shadow lingered in sight.

He glanced toward the dark figure to his left, and saw Pitch dusting off the last of Yves’s smoke with a distasteful look on his face. The crow on his jacket flew off with a caw and Pitch let the long material pour from his hands so he could brush the feathers out of it.

_At least he didn’t have to kill himself just to teleport us here,_ Jack thought.

_Shame_ , his thoughts replied.

Before Jack could snark at that, white and black suddenly caught his eye by his feet, and both he and Pitch looked down to see the ghost spirit standing (more like swaying) between them.

Pitch gave Jack the blandest look and Jack cringed. “I hope Yves won’t mind?” he tried, and Pitch simply rolled his eyes and started toward the house.

As he threw his coat onto his shoulders, he glanced back at Jack, then at the tiny spirit. “Why aren’t you afraid of that?”

Jack sniffed as he kept a wary eye out for any lingering monsters or crows that might be looking for a midday snack. “Why would I be?”

Pitch stopped on the steps of the porch and just looked at him. “I _saw_ what it did to you.”

Jack’s eyes flickered to Pitch’s as he passed by him on the steps, and he barely stopped the frown from surfacing on his face. Was the man…  concerned? Nah, surely not. He shrugged. “It’s not that bad, you know? It was just upset that we left it behind.”

“What even is it?” Pitch retorted, a touch of distaste in his voice.

Jack shook his head and glanced down at the creature in question as it tried to squeeze its head through the ornate poles holding up the porch railing. “No idea.”

Pitch seemed to let the conversation go at that point, and as Jack went to knock on the door, the crows that Jack assumed had been their escorts – but really, all Yves’s evil birds looked the same – cawed loudly and swooped in to sit on the porch railing. The little ghost spirit was instantly enraptured by them.

Pitch seemed to evaluate the crows for a moment, before letting his eyes travel over the now-barren front lawn. “Did all those crows get smaller?”

Jack’s palm splayed on the front door soundlessly. Was it just Jack’s imagination, or was Pitch being… chatty? He was definitely engaging – no, _initiating_ – non-insulting chit-chat, not only once but repetitively, and that was certainly a first. Maybe all that pain had gone to his head and he’d forgotten how to use his terrible personality.

“They change when Yves does,” he said over his shoulder. “Huge when he’s the King, tiny when he’s himself. I don’t really come here when Yves is Yves, though, so mostly I’ve only really dealt with them when they’re gigantic monsters.”

“And he will be… Yves, now?”

Jack frowned and turned back a little more. He noted, with bleak concern, that the crows on the railing had flown off and managed to convince the little spirit to follow on after them. He watched those twiggy legs run and skip over grass and then through Yves’s dry fields before shaking himself back to the present conversation. “Have you met Yves before? Not just as the King?”

Pitch’s own stare drew back to Jack. “No, I haven’t.”

A grin curled the edges of Jack’s mouth, and Pitch frowned in suspicion. “You’re in for a treat, then,” he said happily, and crashed his fist against the old wood.

Literally not a heartbeat later, as if the owner had been making his way to the door anyway, the wooden panel was swinging inwards and Jack and Pitch were presented with one of the most handsome men Jack had ever known dressed in probably the most expensive mahogany suit history had ever known.

And an orange apron. With frills.

“Bony Jack!” Yves exclaimed with a charming smile and a look in his amber eyes that was sharp enough to cut steel. “Finally you came.”

Jack only took a second to reacquaint himself with the fineness that was Yves’s bone structure, the softness of his cheeks that would always tear in half on the days leading up to Halloween, at the slightly tapered eyes that tore and burnt when he turned into the King. At the mismatched dye job of black and orange that remained the same no matter who he was.

And then his attention dropped to the full body apron tied around Yves’s slim waist and Jack was inching forward before he could think better of the movement. “Damn Yves, did you get this made?”

Yves snorted. “And be felt up by those slimy seamstresses in the fae realm? No thank you. I made this myself.”

“It looks so good! And there are even little pumpkins on the pockets!”

Yves let out a low cackle and swatted Jack’s hand away from the apron’s frills. “Your flattery will get you everywhere, Jack.”

Jack bit his lip, looked up (only slightly, considering Yves was average height again) and asked, “Will you make me a cape? I had a cloak ages ago but I lost it. And it always felt so cool with the wind caught in it.”

“Only if you stop harassing my crows,” Yves said with a smile.

Jack gasped in outrage. “They’re the ones who attack _me_!”

“Details,” Yves said, shoving Jack in the face to move him aside. “You are not even going to introduce us, bony Jack?”

“Oh! Shit yeah, sorry.” He looked back at Pitch and saw that the Nightmare King looked just about as uncomfortable as he had the first time he’d stood on this porch. Jack felt a little bad about neglecting his presence, and quickly introduced the two men. “Pitch, this is Yves Saint Hallow, a domestic clean-freak with a pumpkin fetish. Yves, this is officially Pitch Black, the Gloom King and a grade-A buttwipe.”

“Your introductions are deplorable,” Pitch said, shooting Jack an irritated look.

Jack grinned and Yves gestured for Pitch to go on into the house. “They are all back in the kitchen sitting around my breakfast table like a conferring mob.”

Pitch took his cue from the owner of the realm and passed by where Jack and Yves stood in the doorway. He shot a brief look at Jack, but continued on before Jack could think of giving him some form of reassurance. Besides, he didn’t need reassurance. He’d dealt with Skreek before, and the wolfman was always easier to handle the second time around.

Before Jack could follow after him, he felt Yves’s presence move in on his shoulder. The front door clicked closed and suddenly Yves was a little too close. “By that little introduction, I assume your ass is no longer out of service.”

Jack swung around and narrowed his eyes at Yves’s silky smile. “I will freeze your dick off, Yves.”

A taunting touch brushed over Jack’s hip and Yves moved in a little closer. “You even brought him home to meet the family.” The touch slid lower to his thigh, a thin finger hooking into the tight string looped around his legs. “That is brave.”

“Not as brave as you are right now,” Jack said, his body temperature dropping until Yves had to jerk his hand away from Jack’s pants.

The older man chuckled – a chuckle that still sound like a cackle, Jack didn’t know how he did it – and raised his hand to grab Jack by the chin.

Amber eyes flickered between his, and the cutting edge in them softened a little. “Still got that fire,” Yves said appreciatively. He jerked Jack’s chin up a little roughly and frowned right into Jack’s eyes. “A decade is a long time, Jack.”

Jack felt a slathering of guilt compact over his annoyance like render on brick. “Sorry,” he murmured.

Yves let go of his face and cocked his head toward the back of the house. “Everyone has been waiting on you.”

Jack tried to ignore the double meaning of those words, but his guilt nagged at him, reminding him of how hurt Phoenix had looked on Halloween, of the fact that Skreek had lost his leg while Jack had been gone. Of that piercing look Yves had opened the door with.

But then Yves’s voice, informing him that there was a pie in the oven especially reserved for Jack’s scrawny ass, drew the guilt to a stuttering halt and Jack turned to laugh at the evil grin on Yves’s face.

Maybe it wasn’t all that bad.

_We’ll see._

In the farm-style kitchen, Skreek, Yanov, a wolf Jack didn’t recognise, a scowling fire spirit, and Pitch were all sitting around the breakfast table as promised, a tea cup at the disposal of each entity except for the Nightmare King. The atmosphere was a little too heavy for Jack’s liking, so he sought familiarity in Phoenix’s gaze and greeted the fire spirit with a heartfelt, “Ugh, it’s you.”

Phoenix made a disgruntled face back at him, but genuine concern over the current situation softened the edges of it. “Took the words right out of my mouth, honey.”

“Jack,” Skreek greeted with decidedly less enthusiasm than usual.

“What happened?” was Jack’s instant reply as he mindlessly went and stood by the chair Phoenix was reclined in.

“He’s gonna show us,” Phoenix said, and Jack noticed, for once, that Skreek’s usually three-piece suit was down to just the single piece (his pants and a stained green shirt). His trademark waistcoat was nowhere in sight and Jack felt ill already.

Yves blew back into his kitchen and placed a plain skull with a pair of fangs in the centre of the breakfast table. Skørj, one of Yves’s strongest skulls for transportation, watched everyone in the room with hollow eyes, and even if Jack couldn’t see it, he could very much feel the gaze of the enchanted skull wash over him.

He glanced past Phoenix and saw that Pitch was scowling at Skørj, probably unnerved by the skull’s presence. He felt like telling Pitch that Skørj was a decent choice if they had to travel by Yves’s means. At least it wouldn’t be like travelling with Yvorik, who fucking serenaded his passengers with verse and purposely made the trip take ten times as long.

Just the thought of spending any longer than necessary being teleported unnaturally from place to place made Jack shudder. Pitch twitched a little, his eyes sliding over to Jack’s and shit, he’d caught Jack staring at him, hadn’t he?

But Jack didn’t have much room to be embarrassed since Pitch didn’t make to drop his gaze. The gold in his eyes was still brilliant, bright and moving in lazy rings around his pupils, and Jack felt himself so stupidly caught by the colour that he didn’t hear Skreek say, “Skørj, take us to my mountains,” in a beseeching tone.

He didn’t hear the skull crack its jaw back and begin to cackle eerily. Didn’t see the wafting dark smoke billow from its mouth and begin to fill the kitchen.

All he noticed was that gold ring flare and thread through the grey, infusing like molten light and Jack could almost feel the heat, feel that gold burning the surface of his cold skin.

_Disgusting_ , his thoughts hissed.

With a jolt Jack felt a feral flash of hatred, pure and undiluted _loathing_ , course through his heart. He panicked, no idea where the emotion had flared from, and spun from Pitch to grab the table for support. But the table wasn’t there anymore. Darkness had filled the kitchen and Jack couldn’t see anyone or anything. Not Phoenix, not his staff, not Pitch. Not himself.

His throat closed, sealed like a cauterised wound, and he blinked, blinked, but still nothing changed. The darkness poured around him and down his throat, skimming over his skin like unwanted fingers and chasing away the warmth he’d been imagining.

Ice flooded his veins.

And terror erased the last of his thoughts.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, your comments and kudos make me so happy thank you so much for them all! and I'm always excited (like, butterflies nervous sort of excited) whenever i get to read your comments and your thoughts about how the characters and chapters are going. It's always wonderful to get a feel for what you guys are thinking so i know if i have to tweak some plot or not!  
> so thank you <3


	10. High in the Mountains... (Part I)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Pitch performs his public service as the resident expert on brain-prodding.

Pitch could feel it through the rolling waves of murky smoke.

He couldn’t see it – couldn’t see anything, since his night vision wasn’t calibrated to deal with whatever substance Yves (and the Halloween King) could manipulate – but he could feel it. _Taste_ it.

The _fear_.

It nearly doubled him over with hunger.

A splintering, burning pain spread through his chest, and it took every ounce of composure Pitch owned not to instantly react. Starvation, reminding him that he hadn’t had a truly satisfying feed since his Nightmares had revolted, scorched through him. He dug blunt fingers into the hollow of his own throat, hooking them over his icy collarbone, and relished in the lance of actual agony that protested his actions.

The smoke began to finally clear, exposing grey stone walls and the blearily blinking entities who’d been transported by the skull.

Driven by instinct alone, Pitch’s eyes swung until they locked onto the object of his hunger.

Like an uninvited guest at a dinner party, the lotus was there, smugly sitting between the ribs in a too-cold chest, while its unadulterated fury rolled off its presence in waves.

Its grey stamens had risen and curled chokingly tight around throat of its victim, while the petals peeled back and turned inside out, becoming dry and brittle and flaking until they were skeletons. The edges of the decayed petals sharped, blood oozing and dripping from the points and dissolving into shadows the further they fell.

The spirit the lotus was attacking stood perfectly still, body a single taut measure of tension. Pitch stepped toward him, and felt the kick that came off the spirit’s terror as he grew near. The pain that had started to throb back into life in his shoulder dulled as a sweep of energy flowed through him, and by the time Pitch was standing in front of the mass of terror, the ache was gone altogether.

“Pitch,” a voice said. _Yanov_ , a rational shred of Pitch’s mind offered. Three sets of footfalls made their way down the hall, away from them, and Pitch only dimly kept note of their smattering anxieties as they retreated. “We’re headed this way when you’re ready.”

Without taking his eyes off his prey, Pitch nodded and heard Yanov’s footsteps join the rest of the party. The frost spirit beneath his gaze didn’t even rouse at the sound of the others leaving. His open, sightless eyes pointed uselessly toward Pitch’s collarbone.

The Nightmare King’s tongue traced his bottom lip as his bloodlust positively purred in his ear. In a seductive tone it pointed out the straining tendons in the spirit’s neck, the fiercely tight grip his fingers had on his staff, the way his body reacted, twitched or grew even more still, when the tips of the stamens reached over and brushed across a shoulder or a cheek.

Dear darkness, did Pitch want to eat the spirit.

He took a step closer and felt the cold that was radiating off the spirit’s body. His eyes dashed to the lotus and saw the stamens tighten their hold on the spirit’s throat. Pitch wanted to tug on those vines, tug until the frost spirit was properly gasping for air. Until he was close enough that Pitch could sink his teeth into his pale throat, cut off his oxygen for good, and smear red all over that skin until the lotus transformed into a familiar bitter honeyed darkness.

Soft blue eyes flickered, and rose to Pitch as if he’d somehow sensed the danger looming before him. His gaze was still blank, though, with a trace of bitter cold creeping in around the edges. Pitch swallowed and took another step forward, his boot sliding between the spirit’s unclad feet. Cold blasted around him warningly.

“Jack,” he murmured, because they were now on civilized terms apparently. The spirit stiffened and his eyes regained a semblance of focus. “Jack.”

An audible breath of air flowed in past Jack’s lips, and Pitch’s eyes fell to them for just a moment before dropping down to the bleeding lotus in his chest. As each drip of blood burst and dissolved into a wisp of shadows, it occurred to Pitch – or at least a still-rational corner of Pitch’s mind – that whenever he had travelled with Jack through his shadows or through Yves’s smoke Jack had always closed his eyes before the darkness engulfed them. Squeezed them shut and forgot how to breathe.

Was he terrified of teleportation? He _had_ once pointed out his displeasure of the over-use of North’s snow globes.

Or… could it be?

Pitch inhaled deeply, inspecting the flavour of Jack’s fear as he let the bitter taste seep into his bones like well-needed life. He moved in closer as he sifted through the sensations, the flavours, until his nose was nearly brushing Jack’s icy cheek and the frost spirit had gone rigid.

“Jack,” he breathed, and his fingers itched to just reach down into that small chest and tear right into the fear nestled there.

Jack shuddered, his face pulling away from Pitch as proper recognition finally entered his expression. “…Pitch?”

Pitch watched his face curiously, watched as life poured back into his blue eyes and the lotus loosened its death grip on his windpipe. The terror began to wane, to stutter and falter back out of existence.

_You still think you’re so safe around me_.

Pitch rose back to his full height, ignoring the stinging throb left behind in his chest when his hunger realised it wasn’t going to be sated today. As his bloodlust reluctantly quietened, Pitch appraised Jack and asked, “Are you afraid of the dark?”

With substantially more verve than Pitch had expected, Jack violently recoiled at the question, his eyes growing wide. He shoved Pitch to get away from him, an icy hand against a broad, sore chest that sent Jack stumbling back into the nearest stone wall.

“Of course I’m not,” he spat, grabbing hold of his hair. “Nobody asked you.”

Pitch couldn’t help the interest that sparked at the spirit’s reaction. He’d hit the nail on the head, hadn’t he?

Pale fingers dug into his scalp and Jack doubled over at the waist, screaming at the ground, “I said nobody asked you. Ugh, just _stop_. You’re making it worse. Shut _up_.”

Pitch’s eyes narrowed as the lotus in Jack’s chest fluttered and began to peel once again. Stupidly enough, something about that lotus, its very presence, started to royally tick Pitch off. And so disregarding rational logic – or was that just his hunger? – screaming at him to just let the spirit suffer and feed while he had the chance, his hand reached for Jack’s head to pry those fingers out of his skin.

Then he had a thought.

_Is this what was happening that night at Yves when I left you in that room? And when we were talking on the porch the next morning?_

There had been no presence of the lotus, admittedly, but Jack had seemed just as uncomfortable, just as pained as he looked now. Pitch remembered the way he had been trembling in the darkness. His face contorting behind that dusty old book.

_What’s going on in that head of yours, Jack?_

A finger brushed against a strand of white hair, and in a single moment of pure, intense clarity, blue eyes snapped to Pitch. The Nightmare King froze. Those usually soft eyes were glowing with a light so feral and so _cold_ Pitch’s instincts were already forcing him to draw back, to take a step back, before Jack had even snarled, “Get the fuck away from me.”

Pitch retreated another step, shock and confusion warring in his head until they were both reminded that this was what he’d always wanted from the spirit. This rage, this hatred.

He felt an emotion, dark and clogging, wash away his surprise. Drown the terrible feeling of being caught off-guard, sweep up and dispose of the pieces of his brain that couldn’t reconcile the frost spirit who’d accompanied him for the better part of the day with the one snapping at him now.

The emotion, the sensation, collected up everything in Pitch’s organs and offered a merciless death to them all. He was too far gone to fully identify what was trickling through him, thick and staining, but he was beginning to get the dreadful feeling that it would turn him into a hypocrite.

Because he _knew_ , if nothing else, that it certainly was not acceptance.

Clenching his fist, he spun and stalked away from Jack before he could be tempted – or baited – into doing or saying something that would ruin him.

“Wait, Pitch –”

His footsteps were silent, swift, but for once he wished he’d make enough noise when he walked to block out the sound of the spirit desperate calling after him as he left.

 

Skreeklavic’s fortress was enormous. The halls were expansive passages with ceilings so high they’d give Pitch’s lair (a natural born _cavern_ ) a run for its money. The stones were old, weathered even on the inside, interrupted only by sweeping arches and leadlight windows sometimes spanning the width of walls, other times nestled so high that only a sliver of light entered the fortress.

Although the place was altogether too bright for Pitch’s tastes, it was a well-built castle with walls that would be impenetrable by anything short of a cannon. A blast of light hit the side of Pitch’s face as he stomped past one of the greater windowed walls, and he allowed his eyes to skim the horizon briefly. They were extremely high in the mountains, so high in fact that Pitch could see clouds gathering on the tips of the castle’s towers off to his right. Even with the sun angled at a distasteful incline (meaning that it was out altogether) the mountains and the valley he could see in the distance still managed to look dark and ominous. It was nothing like the Tooth Palace’s sparkling presence in its own mountain.

Pitch’s lip curled on its own accord as he remembered the last visit he’d made to Punjam Hy Loo. The threat he’d presented to Jack on the ridges in hopes that the damned spirit would finally stay the hell away from him.

And what did he do? Show up three days later and _save Pitch’s life_.

_And now he’s regressed into snarling at me like a hurt dog._

Pitch groaned to himself. The fact that he was troubled about this whole damn situation made the Nightmare King want to destroy Jack. To take the cold Jack had forced into his body to heal and to soothe, and return it in the form of a lovely, fitting death. It made him want to watch the spirit bleed in some hope of understanding _why_.

_“Not everyone cares about the great good and evil divide as much as you do.”_

Jack was a fool. There was a reason there was a divide. It wasn’t up to Pitch to care about it, but to acknowledge it and do everything in his power to push his borders until the enemy had no territory left to stand on.

He recalled a brief flash of those glowing, hate-filled eyes, and Pitch’s fingers found their way into his hair. He tugged on a fistful of strands, just as Jack had done, and made an irritated sound when not even the pain could chase away the shock and apprehension that was still lingering in Pitch’s gut.

_Maybe he’s finally taken the hint._

Maybe.

Pitch found the others in a trashed ballroom at the end of the hallway. Light fixtures and broken chairs were strewn across the stone floor, and shreds of clothes and half a torn curtain hung from a rusting chandelier in the centre of the room. A few more wolves were standing around their pack leader, some holding brooms, and another a bucket and mop. Notably, most were sporting fresh bandages.

They all turned to Pitch as he stepped into the room, and to Pitch’s dull surprise, the tiny anxieties they were all nursing didn’t so much as flinch upon his arrival.

Aside, of course, from the usual fear that burst into life in the fire spirit’s chest.

“Why does that guy have to be here?” Phoenix grumbled, rubbing the side of his head as he quickly turned his glare from Pitch to Skreeklavic.

The werewolf overlord sent the spirit a chiding look. “Pitch is the only person I actually need here. You can go home.”

“Like fuck I’m going to do that!” Phoenix retorted.

“Then clam up and be a good little helper.”

Before the words of Skreeklavic could ignite some flame of passion within the fire spirit and make Pitch’s day worse, he cut in quickly and asked, “What’s happening?”

“More like what happened,” the wolf with the mop corrected.

Skreeklavic ushered Pitch over to their conferring group. Once he was close enough to benefit from Phoenix’s blatant distress over his presence, the werewolf overlord said lowly, “While we were gone for Halloween my wolves were attacked.”

Pitch paused at that information, confusion taking a moment to grab hold of his mind. Skreeklavic… he was a warmonger, even more so than Pitch. The werewolf soaked in the glory and spoils of his wars and as far as Pitch knew, certainly didn’t go crying for help when the tables turned in his enemies favour.

“The place was a mess when we returned,” Yanov added unhappily. “Nearly everyone was injured.”

Injured but not killed? Pitch’s eyes flickered toward the semi-curtained window on the far wall, at the sweeping view of the valley it offered.

“This fortress doesn’t look that easy to break into,” he murmured, half to himself.

“It’s not,” said Skreeklavic, and something in his tone drew Pitch’s attention back to him.

“What do you need me to do?”

After a brief look shared with Yanov, Skreeklavic said, “Take a look at my wolves. None of them can tell me what attacked them and everyone who wasn’t hurt has even less of a clue what happened. But I know some of them are still frightened of something. They just can’t say it.”

The Nightmare King swallowed that request and it took a solid few seconds for him to properly digest it. “You’re giving me lease to go digging around in the heads of your pack,” he clarified, because, frankly, he _needed_ clarification here. Nobody had ever, in all of his years, asked him to do something this invasive. This… _trusting_.

_Looks like idiots who stick together trust together_ , he thought, picturing for a bitter moment the sight of Jack under his hands on Yves’s porch.

“You’re fucking crazy, Skreek,” Phoenix exclaimed as Skreeklavic said, “Yes I am.” The werewolf paused and slid his eyes back to Phoenix. “I was talking to Pitch, not you, brat.”

The fire spirit huffed angrily.

Pitch traced the back of his neck with his fingers as he seriously considered how bad this situation could get if he even remotely screwed up. Just as this fortress would be a task and a half to break into, he could only imagine what kind of miracle he’d have to pull to get himself out of here if the wolves turned on him.

His fingers pressed harder into his neck. He really should have just stayed at the Emporium today. “If they’re supressing the fear, it’s not wise to dredge it up,” he warned.

“Can you at least get some hint of what it might be without reminding them of it?” asked Yanov.

Pitch’s hand fell and he bit back an uncomfortable sigh. “I suppose.”

A broom-wielding wolf apparently didn’t like sound of his half-hearted answer, and eyed him warily as he asked Skreeklavic, “Are you sure about this, boss?”

“Yeah,” Skreeklavic said, meeting Pitch’s eyes. “He’s good.”

Before Pitch could try to process Skreeklavic’s approval, the temperature in the room suddenly dropped. It was only a slight change, made even less noticeable by the fire spirit burning hotly just to Pitch’s left, but it was enough of a change that it drew Pitch’s eye to the ballroom entrance before everyone else had noticed the new presence.

Jack lingered in the doorway with a hand buried deep in his pocket. His gaze was pointedly taking in the disarray before him, staying well clear of the people standing in the middle of the room.

Staying well clear of Pitch.

Irked, Pitch let his eyes fall from the frost spirit as Phoenix perked up at the sight of his fellow element. The wolves commented on Jack’s arrival, but only for a brief interlude, then the mop-carrier was demanding cleaning instructions from Skreeklavic and the boss was waving his large arms around him.

In Pitch’s periphery, he saw Phoenix’s brows draw together when Jack made no move to join the discussion, and the fire spirit made his way over to where Jack was hanging back.

“You don’t look too good, Frost,” was the greeting Jack received.

And receive he did, albeit very poorly. When Phoenix went to grab Jack by his jumper and presumably haul him over, the frost spirit jerked back and glared at Phoenix. “Guess we’re a matching set then,” he snarked.

Pitch’s eye twitched. Clearly Jack’s mood hadn’t improved one bit.

_At least I’m not the only one he’s upset with._

A second later, he nearly cursed himself for the inkling of relief that’d accompanied the realisation.

Phoenix, apparently not as much of an idiot as Pitch had taken him for, had enough sense to retract his hand before it got bitten. “Jesus, what crawled up your ass?” Phoenix snapped.

Jack flinched, and something softer entered his expression as he rubbed the back of his head. “Sorry. My head hurts, is all.”

Phoenix scowled. “Is it –?”

“Skreek,” Jack called, cutting Phoenix off. The werewolf turned from the argument he was about to have with his wolves over whether to use hot or cold water for cleaning up bloodstains, and his instant reaction was to frown when he saw Jack.

_Can he tell, from all the way over here?_ Pitch thought, a little impressed by the werewolf’s intuition.

“Is there any reason for me to stay around with you guys?” Jack asked, ignoring the hot glare he was receiving from the fire spirit beside him.

Skreeklavic was silent for a moment. Then he seemed to decide something and waved a hand toward Jack. “Nah. Only really brought you along so Pitch would come too.”

Pitch’s brow rose at whatever insinuation he was being implicated in. Across the other side of the room, it was a testament to Jack’s mood that the spirit didn’t even blink.

He turned and pointed down the hall. “I’m gonna go for a walk, then.”

“If you see any piglet spirits, keep your feet together and ice their porky behinds!” Skreeklavic hollered after him.

Jack laughed, but even to Pitch’s ears the sound was unnervingly empty. “Will do.”

There was a moment of stillness in the wake of Jack’s departure, during which Phoenix and Skreeklavic considered the place Jack had one stood and Pitch watched the throbbing collection of the frost spirit’s fear traverse the castle.

“Maybe –,” Phoenix started, sounding hesitant.

But Skreeklavic cut him off quick. “He’s a big boy, Phoenix,” he said as he stomped over to the fire spirit and slapped a hand on his shoulder. “We’ll worry about him later. Come on Pitch, the patients await your inspection.”

Pitch was led into a meeting room just further down the hall that was lined with beds and injured bodies. Whatever had made it a meeting room in the first place – a grand dining table, some desks and various lamps – were now being used to hold medical equipment and illuminate wounds that still needed tending to.

Clyde gave the group a wolfish smile when he caught sight of them, and sidled up to Pitch like some slick bastard.

“Come crawling back to gamble away your honour, Pitch?” Clyde asked with a grin.

Pitch rolled his eyes at the wolf. “Who was it again who won that questionable game of cards?”

Clyde made a rude noise with his nose, and Pitch smirked at the wolf as Skreeklavic grabbed his attention.

“Who’s well enough to give our plan a shot?”

The playfulness fell from Clyde’s expression. “Cyrus,” he said quietly.

Skreeklavic pulled back slightly. “You sure?”

Clyde certainly didn’t look sure, but nodded anyway. “Everyone else is still in a lot of pain. No point in adding to it, right?” Before Skreeklavic could answer his wolf, Clyde looked to Pitch and jerked his head toward the sea of beds before them. “This way.”

Pitch was led to the bedside of a young boy with yellow-blond hair and a bunch of bandages wrapped around his head and across his left eye. He seemed to be asleep, and Pitch had to think of the irony of his current situation. So close to a sleeping child, with not a Nightmare in sight, and he couldn’t feed because he was on a _job_.

He’d better be rewarded for his impeccable level of professionalism at some point in his dreary life.

He took a seat in a wooden chair by the bedside as Clyde wandered off. Pitch took stock of the boy in front of him, taking note of the fact that not an inkling of fear was present in his chest as he slept.

“You’re hesitating, Nightmare King,” Clyde commended from over his shoulder.

Pitch slid him an irritated look. “Fears like these are landmines,” he retorted quietly. “If I work the memories the wrong way I’ll trigger the fear and he’ll start to react.”

Clyde turned a little pale. “React?” he asked as he settled a stool on the floor on the other side of the bed and took a seat himself.

“Panic. Badly. And like you said, in the state they all seem to be in, it wouldn’t be wise to cause them more harm.”

The wolf took a moment to swallow the importance of the information. “Is there anything I can do?”

_Stop me from doing this before I break one of your wolves._

“Keep him calm while I work.”

Clyde nodded, took a breath, and lightly touched the cheek of the boy in the bed, his strong, calloused and scarred fingers dusting over tanned skin. When the gentle touch didn’t wake the boy, Clyde poked his finger into the young cheek.

“Hey, bro,” he murmured as he kid blinked his way back into the world of the living. Before he was even conscious, the boy seemed to scent who was touching him, and rubbed his cheek into the palm of Clyde’s hand.

Then he sniffed again, and his eyes opened when he realised he and his brother weren’t alone.

“Who are you?” the kid grumbled at Pitch.

“This guy’s a doctor,” Clyde said before Pitch could have his lick of fun and scare the wits out of the child with the truth. “He’s gonna help fix you up.”

Twin brown eyes narrowed suspiciously and swept over Pitch in brief judgement. “He looks shady.”

Clyde shrugged but didn’t refute the observation, much to Pitch’s irritation. “Boss thinks he’s a reputable guy, so he’s all we’ve got for now.” He shot Pitch a sideways smirk when he noticed the Nightmare King looking thoroughly displeased by this line of conversation.

The kid seemed to accept his brother’s answer, and gave Pitch a hard look. “My big bro will kick your ass if you try to sell my organs.”

Pitch snorted. “I have little interest in your organs.”

“Cyrus. Close your eyes, little man. I ain’t leaving so just close your eyes and relax.”

“Shady…” he muttered as he grudgingly closed his eyes.

Pitch settled his fingers lightly on the boy’s forehead, careful of whatever injury might be lurking beneath his bandages. Clyde threaded his fingers with his brother’s as Pitch felt the delicate network of fear in the boy’s mind burst into his vision.

It took him a few minutes, maybe a little more, to sort through all the mundane fears and memories in the forefront of the boy’s mind. But once he found what he was looking for – a convulsing, turning memory guarded, quite literally, by a serrated thread of fear – he couldn’t have turned his attention away from it if he’d tried.

The memory was masked, as the worst ones sometimes were, and Pitch took a moment to hesitate while he still had the chance.

_If I accidently break him, I’m as good as dead myself._

He felt like groaning. When was the last time he’d had to work so hard to protect a life rather than destroy it?

_Recently. Very recently._

Pitch took a deep breath through his nose to calm himself.

_Focus_ , he told himself.

He had but a moment with the memory. A single moment before the fear that was certainly more sentient than Pitch wholly appreciated snapped at him with an open mouth of teeth and Pitch drew back before he could cause an incident.

But for a flash, he had seen it. The heart of the boy’s masked fear.

The scene portrayed a saw-toothed length of darkness stabbing one huge spiked leg into the centre of the ballroom, throwing stone and bodies everywhere. Screams had shaken the entire castle and the eyes of the boy had fallen, fallen until they landed on a half-shaved head of blond hair lying in a pool of blood.

Deeply unnerved, Pitch carefully extracted himself from the boy’s mind, so careful as to touch not a single memory or fear on his exit path. As soon as he was out and free, he slumped back in his seat. He took mental stock of the ballroom they’d entered earlier – at the fact that there was definitely no crater in the centre of the room. He also peered over at Clyde, just to make sure the wolf was still in one piece.

_He had to be, anyway. He was with us on Halloween. Not even in the castle._

So what on this decrepit earth was that so _obviously_ _false_ memory doing there?!

Pitch looked up at the faces standing around the bed, all waiting on him to start talking. He looked back over at Clyde, then down at the boy rubbing his eye as he awoke once again.

“What just happened?” he asked.

Clyde sighed in relief at the lack of distress in his brother’s voice, and Pitch stood and looked at Skreeklavic. “Is there anyone else I can look at?”

Skreeklavic scanned over the other wolves in the room before shaking his head and nodding toward the doorway. “Not in here. There are two more rooms filled with the wounded, though.”

Clyde stayed behind with his brother as Pitch and an unusually quiet Phoenix were led to the nearest dining-hall-turned-infirmary, where Tanton was stationed in his pierced glory. He was seated at a desk in the corner of the room, flicking through a large tome as he held an I.V. high for the wolf lying in the bed beside him. He looked up and waved with his free hand when he saw everyone pile into the grand space, and Skreeklavic made his way over to peer at whatever Tanton was reading. Yanov went in the opposite direction, to the bedside of a woman sleeping soundly.

“Is Frost okay?”

Pitch twitched a little in surprise, and looked over at the fire spirit, who was standing a safe several feet away from him. Although he was asking Pitch a direct question, he still had trouble holding the Nightmare King’s eyes, and for the first time Pitch wondered why, out of all the people he had met over the last few days, was _this one_ so scared of him. Not even Jack had ever harboured this level of fear toward him, and he’d seen more than first hand exactly what Pitch was capable of.

Pitch considered the fire spirit and his query. “Define okay.”

Looking like he’d rather combust than have to converse with Pitch, the fire spirit bit out, “You see shit, don’t you? Or you can smell it or something. Is he walking or about to throw himself from the battlements?”

Pitch startled a little. He’d known the spirit’s mood was foul, but was it seriously bad enough to warrant this level of concern?

The fire spirit, growing uncomfortable in the silence, threw a look at Pitch and added, “He’s been gone a while.”

Pitch cast his own gaze beyond Phoenix, and with his extra sense, scanned the castle until he saw Jack’s still-disgruntled fear roaming the inner halls. “He’s well within the parameters of the castle,” Pitch eventually relayed.

Phoenix bit his cheek and Pitch offered him a pointed figure in the direction of Jack’s fear. “That way, if you still want to find him.”

Abruptly having had enough of their little exchange, Phoenix simply grunted his thanks (if he was even thanking Pitch at all) and skulked over to Tanton and Skreeklavic with his hands in his pockets.

_Charming_.

When Pitch received the signal from Skreeklavic and Tanton, indicating who was to be Pitch’s next brain-prodding victim, he noticed that there were several wolves flittering between beds and tending to the injured. Just like the cleaners from before, the soldiers-turned-nurses looked about the healthiest of the bunch, with only a few bandages and a compress between the lot of them.

Although they let Pitch through to their wards with no questions, Pitch could feel their unwelcoming glares. They didn’t like the idea of Pitch wafting through the minds of their fellow pack members as much as Pitch had thought Skreeklavic wouldn’t like the idea.

But, short of a hypnotist, Pitch was probably the best cut out for helping the wolves under these strange circumstances. So, for the sake of diplomacy, he did quite an honourable job (in his opinion, anyway) of not poking out the eyes boring holes into him.

By the end of his inspection (resulting in a revoltingly tense atmosphere, although no brain-dead casualties, to his relief) Pitch was certain of one thing:

Everyone had been hallucinating. Or, at the very least, distressed enough that they’d completely lost a stable hold of rational perception.

To pair with Clyde’s brother’s certainty over his brother’s death and the destruction of a (very sturdy, the last time Pitch checked) ballroom, another wolf thought half the castle had been destroyed by the monster and everyone else devoured except her. A young female wolf was reunited with the grisly corpses of her dead brothers while an older man watched all of the pack members peel themselves inside out.

It was an honest mercy that not a single one of them could remember a thing.

“The verdict?” Skreeklavic demanded after Pitch pulled back, grimacing, from that last scene.

“Considering the situation, we should probably take this outside,” Tanton advised as he joined the group of them. He’d left his I.V. duties with a wolf that was trying her best not to noticeably listen in on what was going down, and upon realising how many ears were in the room, Skreeklavic nodded and ushered them all into the hallway.

Pitch leaned back against a damp wall and met Skreeklavic’s eyes. “Their memories are distorted,” he uttered bluntly.

“What do you mean?”

“Some of the wolves think the entire castle was destroyed that night, others believed that everyone was murdered.” Pitch watched as Skreeklavic’s complexion grew increasingly grey, and quietly added, “Clyde’s brother saw him die in front of his eyes. But obviously that couldn’t have happened.”

“Since he was with us,” Skreeklavic agreed, echoing Pitch’s earlier thought.

“To alter the perceptions of a castle full of werewolves….” Tanton muttered. “What a stupid trick. Why not just do a proper job of destroying the place?”

Skreeklavic and Yanov growled at Tanton for his callous suggestion, but Pitch could see what the wolf was getting at. With a notebook propped up against the stone wall beside Pitch’s head and a pen being crunched between his back molars, Tanton was determined to bring some sort of intellectual aid to this problem, even if it meant presenting his leader with scenarios nobody wanted to think about.

_He’s diligent_ , Pitch acknowledged as Tanton’s name officially fell off his shit-list.

“It’s potentially more problematic than just a trick,” Pitch said, and Tanton looked at him curiously. “The memories are vivid enough that if they ever remembered them they’d think it was completely true.”

“But they’re not,” Yanov protested, looking visibly shaken. “Everyone’s okay, relatively. Nobody died. Except for a little furniture thrown around nothing major was damaged.”

“Shut up and let the man talk,” Tanton said as he furiously noted down Pitch’s observation.

“What else did you get?” Skreeklavic prompted, looking sorely concerned by this news.

“There’s this monstrous entity that’s in the corner of everyone’s memories. But nobody can remember exactly what it looks like.”

A spark of anger lit in Skreeklavic’s eyes. “So something did break in.”

“But it didn’t do any actual damage, right?”

Pitch nodded at Tanton’s question and saw the wolf note something else down in his book. “Whatever this thing was, it was strong enough to mess with everyone’s heads without leaving any sort of physical trace of its presence. Or even some sort of scent, which we would have picked up on straight away when we got back.”

Skreeklavic growled. “I’m livid that this happened when I wasn’t here.”

Yanov looked like he wanted to throw up. “Boss –”

“I know sulking won’t help. But _goddamnit_ , I’m mad. When we find whatever did this to my pack I’m going to –”

“But why would it hide what it did?” Tanton murmured, tapping his pen against his lip.

As Yanov continued trying to placate Skreeklavic, Pitch briefly scanned the scribbled notes Tanton had been collecting. “Concealing the memories?”

“Yeah. I mean, that’s just weird,” Tanton replied. “At least let your victims remember the damage you caused. For the fear factor, if nothing else.”

A cog must have clicked in Tanton’s mind, and suddenly the wolf turned grey. “You don’t think –”

_He’s smart_ , Pitch thought as he hummed his affirmative before Tanton could even finish his question. He shared a brief, grim look with the werewolf before Tanton added another line to his notes with a trembling hand. “Fuck,” Tanton replied.

“And everyone’s injuries?” Yanov said, turning from Skreeklavic and looking between Tanton and his notebook. “How did everyone get so hurt when we couldn’t smell a single foreign presence on them?”

Skreeklavic made a noise that was beyond hurt when he realised the answer himself, and Phoenix, who had been hanging back from the group, echoed the sound in his own chest. Pitch grimaced at Skreeklavic’s wailing, at the strain of whatever fear Phoenix was trying to contain in his chest, as Tanton gave Yanov an unhappy look. “The monster thing that came to assault the pack wasn’t a tangible presence. Not according to what Pitch could get a glimpse of, anyway.”

Yanov recoiled. “Does that mean… everyone’s injuries…”

“They must have done it to themselves,” Tanton concluded, his hand clenching on the pen. “Or to each other.”

 


	11. Where the Wolves Howl (Part II)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Jack experiences some nasty deja vu, a whole bunch of uninvited guests make Skreek's day worse, and Pitch has a (metaphorical) olive branch shoved in his grumpy face.

It took a while for Jack’s thoughts to settle back into an organised, semi-coherent semblance of stability. By the time he’d gotten a solid grasp of his common sense and stopped _flinching_ every time he thought a shadow moved near his feet, he found himself in the bowels of the castle, tired and utterly lost.

But the fortress was a decent enough place to get lost in, at least.

Despite the obvious hell anyone had to go through to navigate their way to Skreek’s castle, Jack appreciated the werewolf’s place in the Carpathian Mountains. The wolves were blessed with a view of the entire world if they glanced out the glazed windows, and even more from the ramparts at the very top of the castle. Although Jack couldn’t witness either sight from wherever he was now, he basked in the memory of the last time he’d visited, of the incredible sweep of mountains, valleys, and villages this place watched over.

The fortress was surrounded by a kind of open space that was even freer than the expanse of white that surrounded North’s Workshop, and a damn sight better than the snow storms which tore around Boreas’s castle in a never-ending antisocial circuit.

But although the external views gave Jack a sense of freedom, the interior of Skreek’s castle, where he was floundering at the moment, reminded him a little too much of Pitch’s lair. The rooms were cavernously large and hauntingly dark when the sun couldn’t find a window to peek through. The stone walls seeped moisture and moss and the floors sometimes pooled with water as deep as Jack’s ankles.

And now, there was the quiet.

He’d been here a few times before, and every time there’d always been pups and grown wolves alike streaking through the hallways like the lively family they were. There was always lots of screaming and yelling and laughter.

But now the halls were so quiet Jack could hear the soft _tap tap_ _tap_ of tiny feet – feet he presumed belonged to the little piglets Skreek wanted him to ice – dancing across the stone floors.

He was reminded, for an awful moment, of North’s Workshop falling into a terrible silence after Sandy had put the entire place to sleep, and a sick feeling churned in his stomach.

_If you were going to be this weak, you should have stayed with the others._

Jack passed by a red toy cart parked haphazardly against the side of the wall, and made a mental note to inform someone of its whereabouts in case any of the young wolves had lost it down here. “Don’t give me that bullshit. You’d still be kicking up a fuss if I was hanging around Skreek and Pitch.”

He shuddered faintly as he remembered the vile things his thoughts had been hurling at Pitch back in the hallway, back when Pitch’s eyes had been glowing a ring of molten gold and managed to unnerve Jack enough that the ice that’d been ready to splinter through his veins actually gave up its fight for once.

His thoughts seemed unperturbed by his assessment. _You had a choice, and you chose to join these villains on their merry adventure rather than help North. And you suffered for it. I see a direct correlation._

Jack shook that complete crap out of his head. He hadn’t been careful enough when Skørj had been set down on the table, hadn’t been _observant_ enough when the skull had been addressed, and _that’s_ why he’d freaked out on the way over here. If North or one of the Guardians had a similar method of transport to Yves, he’d have experienced the exact same episode.

It wasn’t Yves’s fault for not being wholly “good”.

Neither was it Jack’s for choosing to come and help Skreek over hanging around to bother North.

_Ahh, but it’s your fault you have that fear, isn’t it?_

Jack stopped abruptly as his heart punched him in the ribcage with bruising force. Intense anger flared in his chest, burning around his offended heart, and indignant revulsion twisted so thickly in his throat he nearly threw up. “Say something like that again and I’ll find a way to shut you up for good,” he warned his thoughts coldly.

_So scary_ , they mocked, unconcerned.

Mercifully, his ears latched onto the muffled sound of voices further down the hall. In an instant, his feet were moving fast, carrying him faster, until he was sprinting for a release from his damned thoughts and the horrible silence clinging to the castle walls.

He dashed open an enormous creaking door concealing the sweet sound of living beings, and stopped short at the sight of so many makeshift sick beds. So many wounded wolves.

_This is too much like –_

“Jack!”

Jack whirled at the sound of a familiar voice, and his heart squeezed a little when he saw Hex all bandaged up in a bed on the far wall. The huge bundle of dark dreadlocks sitting atop her head swayed violently as she waved at Jack. Keeping one eye on that teetering up-do, and another on the rest of the half-sleeping wolves in the room, he made his way over to her slowly, dread weighing down his feet as he took each step. When he was finally at her bedside, the wolf smacked him in the chest with powerful hands despite the fact that her arms were covered in gauze.

“Jack, you’re still as pretty as ever,” she cooed, batting her eyelashes at him.

Jack fell into the chair next to her bed and looked over all the visible cuts and scrapes across her neck and collarbone. “You’re all hurt, Hex.”

She made a face. “Everyone is. Boss had a right heart attack when he came back after Halloween, I tell ya.”

Jack felt ill. If anything, Hex’s words were a grand understatement. Skreek loved his pack with his entire being. Jack could only imagine what state he had fallen into once he was out of the line of sight of his wolves.

“I bet he did,” he said softly, his heart positivity aching for Skreek.

“Frost boy, stop flirting with my patient.”

He peered over at Xani as she wove her way over to Hex’s bedside with a bowl of water and a towel. She placed both on the bedside table before leaning in and pressing a sweet (but undoubtedly possessive, if that sidelong look she shot at Jack was any indication) kiss to Hex’s lips. Jack smirked.

“Xani!” Hex greeted with a giggle.

Xani took a moment to give Hex a warm look before gesturing to Jack. “Help me sit her up.”

Jack put his staff against the wall, and with an arm around Hex’s back, he and Xani gently – so, so gently – pulled her into an upright sitting position.

“What happened to everyone?” he asked as Xani repositioned the pillows behind Hex’s back while the patient being fussed over smiled tiredly but affectionately at her partner.

“The boss brought your Pitch here to find that out,” Xani replied soberly.

Jack frowned, confused. But before he could open his mouth to ask what she meant, suddenly Hex’s doe-eyed affection vanished. Gasping in outrage, the wolf whirled on Jack with a level of force she really shouldn’t have been exerting considering how hurt she looked, and Jack’s question was effectively shoved back down his throat by her exclamation of, “WHAT! Who’s Pitch?! I won’t let him have my Jack!”

Xani forcibly wrestled Hex back into a position befitting an invalid, and with a cunning smile cut toward Jack, she said, “I don’t think you’d be able to stand up to the Nightmare King, love.”

Like a switch being flipped, an incredibly devious light sparked in Hex’s olive eyes. “Pitch _Black_? Ooh la la Jack.” She wiggled her eyebrows at him suggestively, and Jack wanted to die right then and there. “I always knew you had a taste for the bad guys.”

“I hate you, Xani,” Jack deadpanned to the wolf leaning over her charge, earning himself a vicious smirk in reply.

A cringe-worthy creak echoed from the hinges of the door behind him. All three of them looked over and caught sight of Skreek, Phoenix, Tanton, and Pitch wandering in.

Before Jack could think to avert his eyes, to keep himself from getting hooked by that trance-inducing gold that’d lit up at the sight of his fear earlier on, his concern skyrocketed when he noticed how exhausted they all looked. Skreek was haggard, his usually proud stance sagging, Tanton’s forehead was pinched as if he was trying to fight off a headache, Phoenix looked a shade too pale to be healthy, and whatever invigoration Pitch had obtained from Jack’s earlier episode looked well and truly drained by now.

The other three took little notice of Jack’s presence (they’d probably only come to talk with Xani anyway) but Pitch’s gaze caught on Jack’s chest the second he’d walked into the room. It rose to his eyes a painful heartbeat later, and Jack’s breath snagged somewhere in his throat at the sight of so much gold littered through Pitch’s eyes.

Skreek must have had him neck-deep in fear for his eyes to be so gold. There was hardly any silver left in his irises at all, and Jack realised he didn’t know what he thought of the glowing colour. It was mesmerising, visible even in absolute darkness… and yet…

_There’s no point in deciding what eye colour you like best when he hates you for screaming at him earlier_ , his thoughts informed him with a smug edge.

Jack started a little at that. He hadn’t meant to snap at Pitch! But with the darkness tearing at the corners of his vision, the guy looming with his eyes glowing _so_ _brightly_ , and his thoughts hissing horrible _horrible_ things at the man, he’d lost some important filter between his fear and his mouth and…

_Don’t believe me? Just look at his face._

He did. Pitch’s face was blank, expressionless as ever, but despite the lack of rage Jack could visibly see, he still began to doubt his own reason. Was Pitch so mad it wasn’t even registering on his facial features? Did Jack just blow whatever progress he might have made in their not-relationship and send them back to square one again?

Jack’s forehead pinched involuntarily, contorting with guilt and _frustration_ , and he quickly turned away before Pitch could see him look so pathetically contrite. He pushed his palm into his forehead, and glanced up when he noticed Hex’s eyebrows dancing along her brow more furiously than before.

Jack buried his face in his hands and groaned.

“Any luck?” Xani asked the men at the door.

“We think we’ve figured out what went down,” Skreek said as their collective footsteps grew nearer. “Took some searching, though.”

It took a moment for the context of Skreek’s words to click in Jack’s brain. Xani’s earlier statement suddenly making sense, he looked up from his hands and frowned at Hex, who immediately dropped her teasing expression. “You guys don’t know what happened?”

Hex shifted, discomfort radiating from her features, and Xani was quick to snag her attention back from Jack. She shot him a warning look as she caught Hex’s face with her hands, and Jack raised his hands in surrender.

Tanton made a hesitant sound. “Should we, uh, at least talk about this away from –”

Hex battered Xani’s hands off her and levelled Tanton with a hard look. “I’ll just hear it from Xani once you’re gone anyway, so you might as well spill your secrets now. We’ll all have to find out eventually.” She gestured around the room with a finger, and Jack looked to see at least twenty-percent of the room (the only conscious percentage) had their eyes fixed on Skreek and Tanton.

Tanton blew out a sigh. “You’re right, Hex. It’s still gonna be hard news to swallow, though.” He cracked open a leather notebook and waved it at Jack and Xani. “We had Pitch sift through some dormant memories to find out what had happened while we were gone, and it turned out pretty well, honestly.”

Pitch made a noise that seemed to only half agree with Tanton’s attempt at optimism, and Jack _felt_ the ripple of discomfort pass through the room. The other wolves apparently didn’t like the idea of Pitch digging through their minds, even if their boss was the one who brought him in in the first place.

_Who would?_ his thoughts snarked. _Oh, except you of course._

Jack appreciated that comment less than a punch in the face, but managed to hold his tongue for the time being. Not unlike Vanish, Hex would probably murder him if she thought he was cursing at her. And then Xani would raise him from his shallow grave and do it all over again.

“Everyone started attacking each other,” Tanton said, ripping off the bandaid.

A heavy silence settled over the room, and Jack stilled.

He remembered his first thought upon seeing so many hurt bodies lining a makeshift emergency ward, his own fantasy about what North’s Workshop must have looked like during the two weeks he was out cold, and dread lodged like a ball of mud in his windpipe.

Xani and Hex were absorbing, with barely disguised horror, this news while Jack tried to frantically tell his brain to compute the awful déjà vu he was sitting in the middle of.

“But we don’t know how or why. Everyone seemed to be hallucinating, and –”

“They went savage.”

Everyone stopped breathing, and it took a moment for Jack to recognise the voice that had spoken, realise that it had been _him_ that had spoken. Hex looked at Jack with hurt clear in her eyes and Xani seemed about ready to strangle him for his lack of tact.

Jack felt guilt pinch at his chest and he turned around and saw the investigation squad burning holes in him with their gazes. Even Phoenix, who had been otherwise hanging back from the group, had settled eyes swirling with fire and gold onto Jack, and the frost spirit’s brain fizzled from the sheer intensity of them.

“You know something, Jack?” asked Skreek, his concerned expression growing tight.

He was reminded for a terrible, sickening moment of the way North had looked at him when he’d woken up in his office, and Jack looked at his staff as if it could come to life and stick up for him.

_Ha. Hilarious. Stop being a sulking child for once in your fucking life and_ talk _before the werewolf has you buried alive in the cellar._

Jack swallowed, uneasy that his thoughts were begging him to be _cooperative_. “The same thing happened at North’s,” he said quietly. “Or something really similar, at least.”

More silence. Jack chanced a look over his shoulder and flinched a little when he saw that everyone’s stares had increased in intensity by at least four thousand degrees. Even _Pitch’s_ , and he wasn’t usually invested in anyone else’s crap but his own.

Jack’s skin itched. _I feel like they’re trying to fry me here._

“How long ago?” Tanton asked, clicking his pen with an expression that reminded Jack of a human driving instructor deciding whether or not they should fail their student.

“A month or so.”

Skreek swore and rubbed his hand over his chin. “Did you see what happened then?”

_“Open your eyes, Frost. You can’t hide from this.”_

Jack’s eyes flickered to Phoenix, only to see that he had now abandoned staring at Jack to inch further and further away from Pitch. The Nightmare King frowned, then glanced at the retreating fire spirit.

Phoenix flinched and stopped moving.

“The yetis and the elves,” Jack mumbled, watching as Phoenix breathed ash out of his nose, as his hands shook where he had them jammed in his pockets, as the fire spirit paled more with every word Jack mumbled out, “they lost their minds and tried to kill each other. North was so freaked out he sent out his borealis and Sandy had to put everyone in the Workshop to sleep.”

The sound of Pitch humming jarred Jack out of his Phoenix-assessment, and he unintentionally swung his attention to the Nightmare King as he said, “So that’s what that was.”

Jack nodded and let his eyes fall away from that too-gold gaze. “Yeah.”

Skreek looked like he needed a drink. “Did you notice anything else while that was going on?”

Jack shook his head slowly. His little ghost spirit trying to steal North’s swords didn’t seem relevant to Skreek’s situation, so he didn’t bother to mention it.

“So nothing like a massive, hulking –”

“ _Tanton_.”

Jack’s head snapped around and saw that Xani was glaring at Tanton as she cradled a now-trembling Hex in her arms.

Shit.

Skreek repeated the profanity aloud and said, “We’re taking this outside. That includes you, Jack.”

Apologizing to Hex, Jack collected up his staff and hurried out after Skreek and the others. In the dark corridors, Skreek set a cracking pace (despite his metal leg) in a direction Jack wasn’t at all familiar with. Skreek shot a look over his shoulder, and in one swift move, he grabbed Jack by his hoodie and hauled him up to walk next to him.

“Does North have any idea of what caused it?” he asked without pausing his stride.

Jack shook his head. “Not that I know of. I think he’s just put it from his mind while he tries to make his deadline.”

Skreek huffed a humourless laugh. “I don’t know whether to call that cowardice or admire the man’s resolve.”

“It scared him, I know that much. So I don’t think he’ll have his head in the sand for long.”

Skreek shook his head tiredly. “I’ve never heard of anything like this happening before. And all of my wolves have just _forgotten_ about it.” He glanced back again. “Hey Pitch, you ever experienced this before?”

Jack looked behind him and saw the Nightmare King glance away from a still-pale Phoenix and shake his head. Jack scowled a little, confused as to why Pitch kept looking at the fire spirit with that frown on his face.

_You’ve got a sick mind to be jealous over something like this._

Jack turned away rubbed his face in annoyance.

“Was it bad, Jack?”

He looked up at Skreek’s unusually sullen tone, and his heart squeezed again for the werewolf. He thought about lying for a fraction of a second before he smacked the thought from his head. Skreek deserved the truth, and he was enough of a tough guy to handle it. “The yetis are usually sort of nice,” Jack said softly, “but it was like they lost all reason. Didn’t recognise anyone or anything. I got too close to one and –” he shuddered, remembering the frenzied look in the yeti’s eyes as it’d come for his leg. “It was…”

_Horrifying._

_Unnerving._

_Familiar_ , his thoughts supplied.

In a moment of complete confusion, Jack’s breath caught. “Why the hell would that be familiar?” he uttered without thinking.

Behind him, Phoenix made a pained sound, the first sound he had made since Jack had seen him again, and the present sets of eyes were drawn to him with a harsh snap. Skreek stopped walking, stopped everyone walking, and looked from Jack to Phoenix with the beginnings of a frown etching onto his face.

And Phoenix, the usually hot-headed, fire breathing _fearless_ Phoenix, began to well with panic. Jack could see it happen as clearly as if he’d had Pitch’s extra sense, and by the look on Pitch’s face, the man himself was watching it as well.

Phoenix’s eyes darted between them all, and the second they flickered to Pitch, saw Pitch watching him, he jerked back and spun on his heel. He smacked into a werewolf headed toward them as he stormed away from the group.

Jack’s throat tightened in confusion and concern. “Is he –?”

“He’s been too quiet all day,” Skreek said with that frown.

“Boss, there’s a problem.”

Everyone turned to see the wolf Phoenix had bumped into during his escape. He was carrying a still-dripping mop, and Pitch took a large step away from it as the wolf swung the thing around and onto his shoulder.

Skreek’s face grew incredibly dark. “Another one?”

There was exhaustion, irritation, and more than a dash of anger in his voice when the wolf said, “We’ve got company.”

“ _WHAT!_ ”

The werewolf leader could move _fast_ when he needed to, and was down the hall in the direction Phoenix had run in like a storm on a warpath. Tanton and the mop-wielding wolf were right behind their boss, and by the time Jack’s brain registered what the hell was going on, he realised that he’d just been left alone in an ominous hallway with Pitch.

He chanced a look at the man, only to see that the Nightmare King was staring off at a wall with a scowl forming on his face. His self-preservation kicking his limbs into gear, Jack began to follow after the wolves in case Pitch decided to make the most of their remote setting and pay him back for earlier.

But Pitch wasn’t having that. “Your fear has faded,” he said suddenly, jolting a flinch out of the frost spirit.

Jack swallowed and looked back at him. _Your eyes are still too gold_ , he thought as he tilted his head in a magnificent display of feigned indifference. “Disappointed?”

Pitch looked him over once, a skim of the eyes that had an undue amount of cold gathering in Jack’s cheeks. “Not really,” he said, coming to brush past the frost spirit.

And Jack could do nothing but stare after him dumbly as the man walked away.

 

Upon the fortress’s ramparts, outside where a great wind sought to curl under the feet of anyone without proper footing and sweep them off the mountain, Skreek, Tanton, Phoenix, and a few other werewolves were already leaning over the stone wall and staring at whatever hellish sight was approaching from the base of the mountains.

“What are the Imperials doing here?” Skreek bellowed, furious as he smacked his hands against the stone wall. Bits of the mortar cracked off under the force of the blow.

“Have you done anything to piss them off?” a wolf asked his boss.

“Not recently!”

Emerging from the reinforced doorway, Jack vaulted over a stray cannon and rushed to the waist-high stone wall. The distinct song of the fae army was being carried up toward them on the unfavourable winds, and Jack took an irrational moment to consider what exactly Skreek had done to aggravate the winds blowing around his castle.

But his contemplation ended a second after it had begun when he spotted what everyone was gawking at.

_There’s so many of them_ , he thought, horrified at the sight of white and gold flags and armoured bodies winding their way up the narrow path toward the fortress. Although they were still tiny splodges in the distance, there were masses of them, probably several hundred soldiers at least, all crammed into the tight path Skreek purposely designed as a bottleneck for these exact situations.

A shadow came to stand beside him (a shadow Jack had beaten on the way here due to his superior navigation skills), and Jack looked up to see Pitch’s face twist at the sight of the army headed toward them. “Short of arriving on Halloween,” he murmured with a pinch of disdain, “their timing couldn’t be worse.”

“We can’t fight them,” Tanton said hollowly, as if the very fact stripped him of his entire soul.

“What if they don’t want to fight?” Jack asked. “Can’t we go down there and talk some sense into them?”

“Why else would they march an army into my mountains other than to fight us?” Skreek snapped. Jack flinched, and instinctively took a step to the side so Pitch was positioned as a buffer between himself and the wolf. The Nightmare King didn’t miss the move, but for whatever merciful reason didn’t comment on it either.

 Skreek grunted angrily, the earlier despair transformed into rage. “We have to leave.”

Phoenix finally snapped out of his uncharacteristic silence and spun to Skreek with a disbelieving glare. “Are you even hearing what you’re suggesting?”

Skreek didn’t look much more open to having Phoenix’s input than he did Jack’s. “Unless one of us has an army up their sleeve, mine is currently in bandages. No army, no war, we leave.”

Jack could feel his breathing quicken. No. That couldn’t be the only answer. Skreek had so many wolves in the castle, they couldn’t possibly… “I could call North to come help…” Jack suggested, and he twitched when he felt Pitch’s eyes flash down at him.

But Skreek was turning down the offer anyway. “If North’s place looked anything like this when I came home, he’s in no position to leave the Workshop.”

Phoenix was still shaking his head in avid disbelief. “Everyone’s injured, Skreek. You can’t –”

“THAT’S WHY WE CAN’T STAY!” Skreek roared, and for the first time since Jack had known them both, Phoenix actually shrunk back from the wolf. Fear flickered through his eyes, and although swiftly concealed, the very sight of it made an awfully dark feeling well in Jack.

“You shouldn’t look at him like that,” a voice murmured by his shoulder.

Jack’s gaze swung up to Pitch, to the Nightmare King standing a foot closer to him and watching his expression altogether too intently. “Not with his wolves around, anyway,” he added softly, and when Jack’s eyes widened in realisation of what Pitch was saying, a knowing smile curved one side of Pitch’s mouth.

No. He didn’t like this smile. _No_.

_You shouldn’t like any of them, freak._

An involuntary sound escaped Jack’s throat, and he quickly spun away from the man before that terrible smile could dig its claws into his skin.

Blind to the way Phoenix’s fingers were white-knuckled on the stone wall, Skreek growled, “I won’t let any of my wolves get captured in this state. Everyone, start rounding up all the injured into the same room and bring everyone else who can walk down to help. Pups included. Send the healthiest soldiers to make sure the army hasn’t sent any scouts further than they need to be. I’m going to head back to Yves and break the bad news to him.”

“You’re shipping everyone to Yves’s?” Phoenix asked incredulously, and Jack had to commend the effort he made not to flinch when Skreek swung back to him. “You know he only has one bathroom, right?”

A secretive but altogether too-sharp smile exposed the werewolf’s fangs. “You haven’t seen the rest of his place, brat.”

Since Skreek’s orders were absolute, all the wolves (except Tanton, curiously enough) began to move off the battlements and toward their assigned jobs. With one eye on the army miles down the mountain, the other caught Skreek in its periphery. Softly, so as to not antagonise him any further, Jack said, “They’ll take your home, Skreek.”

Skreek must have picked up something from his tone, because for a moment his rigid stance relaxed a fraction. He closed the distance between them and ruffled Jack’s hair with a rough and very warm hand. “It’s not a home without your family in it, Jack. And besides, as soon as everyone’s fit and healthy again, we’re going to come back and drive those Imperials from my mountains screaming in terror.” He thwacked Pitch, who happened to be standing too close, powerfully on the back to conclude his speech. The surprised noise Pitch made, along with the shocked look on his face, was absolutely priceless.

But Jack didn’t get to enjoy it for long. As Skreek turned to join the others, he froze suddenly at the sight of the woman blocking the only entrance back into the castle.

Jack would have whistled at the expression of utter irritation on Xani’s face, if he wasn’t positive it would have gotten him murdered.

With her arms crossed over her chest and her eyebrows trying to replicate the stance, she looked Skreek dead in the face and said, “Boss, you are panicking like some lunatic. And you lot aren’t helping by being so agreeable.”

Phoenix bodily objected to that reprimand. “Hey, I was –”

“Shut up,” Xani snapped, without even looking in his direction. Phoenix deflated instantly, and Xani squared up with her boss. “No one is going anywhere tonight. The army won’t get up the mountain for another day and night at least, and we have enough healthy sentinels to make sure they don’t try any funny business in the meantime.”

Skreek looked like he was asphyxiating. “Xani –”

“One more night,” she pushed, resolve set in her features. “Let everyone heal for a bit longer, otherwise teleporting them will do more harm than good.”

_And she doesn’t want anyone any more injured than they already are. Especially Hex._

Tanton stepped to Skreek’s side and looked up at his boss with a pleading expression. “Xani’s right –”

“Boss,” Xani cut in again. “You need to rest. You haven’t slept in days –”

Skreek scoffed at that. “I’ll sleep when everyone is safe and as far as hell away from the fae.”

Beside Jack, Pitch made a small noise that Jack thought sounded like a little agreement. He looked up and saw that Pitch was once again glaring down at the slowly approaching Imperials, and Jack wondered if he was having sympathy pains for Skreek. He used to have his own army, after all.

_Before they turned on him for being a weak king_ , his thoughts snipped. Jack frowned at them.

“Then at least relax for tonight,” Xani insisted. “You can’t do anything here but worry. Go back to Yves and tell him to send us some of his cooking.”

Skreek raised his head a little higher. Jack guessed that if they weren’t alone out here on the battlements, that if it wasn’t just Skreek, Tanton and Xani out of the horde, he most definitely wouldn’t be giving in so easily. Blood would flow in rivers if any of the other wolves tried to talk to him like this. “I won’t leave,” he said stubbornly.

Xani’s eyebrows twitched and her hip cocked dangerously. “If you don’t leave I will pay off Yves and he’ll never cook you blueberry pie again.”

The werewolf overlord inhaled sharply at the threat, and Jack relaxed a little. Although Skreek valued Yves’s cooking above most things in life, he wasn’t shallow enough to abandon his wolves for food. Xani had already won this fight, she was merely cementing her victory with a cruel ultimatum. He noticed Pitch’s expression twitch at the turn the argument had taken.

“Yves wouldn’t take your money,” Skreek argued, although he didn’t sound too sure.

“You wanna risk it?”

“Go,” Tanton said with a reassuring smile. “If anything happens, we’ll call you, boss.”

“I wasn’t called last time something happened,” Skreek said with a hurt frown.

Xani stepped aside and pointedly told Skreek that, “Tanton, Clyde, Yanov and I are all here. We won’t let anything happen tonight.” Then a smirk that was a shade too malicious graced her usually stoic face, and she added, “You made us your captains for a reason. We’ve got this.”

 

Leaving the castle was as much of a sober affair as arriving, except with the added benefit (if it was even a benefit, Jack couldn’t quite tell) of being greeted in Yves’s dusky realm by the man himself standing on his porch with his shirtsleeves rolled to his elbows and his apron pockets full of apples.

He warmly welcomed Pitch, Phoenix, Skreek and Jack back from their trip, although his eyes never once strayed from Skreek’s face. Phoenix brushed past Yves first, receiving direct orders to take plates and cutlery outside as he went. The suit-wearing baker turned in toward Skreek when the werewolf stepped up onto the porch, ignoring whatever insult Phoenix was tossing at him from within the house.

Jack’s steps faltered a little as he watched Skreek and Yves size one another up, Yves tilting his head back a little to evaluate Skreek’s expression. After a moment, Skreek abruptly turned his head and went on into the house. Yves sighed and made to follow the werewolf.

“Shut the door on your way in,” he called back to Jack and Pitch without even a glance at them.

“I feel ignored,” Jack mumbled.

Pitch wasn’t even listening to him. The frost spirit looked over at the man warily, biting his lip when he saw Pitch’s brows knitted in concentration.

The seed of paranoia his thoughts had planted in his head was growing, flourishing, and Jack didn’t know whether to voice his fear or ignore the matter until Pitch tried to maim him over it. He didn’t want Pitch to hate him. It was… there wasn’t a rational motive, and the more time he spent with Pitch the less he understood about it, the less he felt confident about it, especially with his thoughts berating him constantly. But even with those influences, Jack still _felt_ … even if it was confused sometimes… that he didn’t want to be on antagonistic terms with the man any longer…

…that he never really wanted to be on them in the first place.

Pitch could be funny when he wanted to be (in a really, _really_ dry sort of way) and just a little bit tender when he needed to be (albeit in seriously dire, Jack-dying-on-the-ground type situation). They weren’t exactly wholesome reasons to like a guy who’d snap at Jack on every second breath, but it was enough to see that whatever grouchy exterior Pitch had going for him wasn’t the whole picture.

And those _smiles_. Fuck, if not for the dry humour or the moments when he said Jack’s name like he actually cared, Jack just wanted Pitch not to hate him so he could see more of those smiles.

_You’re seriously messed up._

As if sensing his gaze, Pitch finally looked over at Jack. Eyes flickered down to the frost spirit’s chest, then back up at his face. Pitch frowned. “You’re anxious.”

Jack quickly looked away from him. Screw this guy and his damn superpowers. And screw his _thoughts_! What gave them the right to judge him on whose smile he liked?!

Blowing out a breath, Jack stepped up onto the porch and asked in a tentative voice, “Are you mad?”

Pitch stepped behind him, and Jack could see the confusion present on his face. “At what?”

“At me. I yelled at you.”

That made the Nightmare King pause. Inside the house, Jack heard the distinct sound of Yves cursing at Skreek (the werewolf had probably broken the news about the horde and was about to be broken himself) and Jack focused his eyes somewhere inside the house as he waited for Pitch’s answer.

To his surprise though, it came quicker and with less violence than he’d been expecting. With a sigh, Pitch said lowly, “You were afraid. People don’t act rationally when they’re being choked by so much terror.”

Jack looked at him in shock, before he remembered what Pitch had asked him in that dark hall. What his glowing eyes had asked him. He frowned a little at the Nightmare King. “I’m not afraid of the dark.”

Pitch snorted as he stepped over the threshold. “You can’t lie to me about fear, Jack.”

Jack’s frown deepened. Being afraid of the darkness was like admitting he was terrified of Pitch’s power, terrified of Pitch himself, and he blatantly refused to do that. He absently pulled the front door closed behind him as he bit out, “I’m not,” a little stronger. Pitch looked at him doubtfully and Jack argued, “Was I scared of anything other than the death gods on Halloween when the lights went out? Anything other than _you_ when I was in your lair with you ten years ago? I’m not afraid of the dark.”

_Just what’s waiting for you in the dark_ , his mind murmured.

Jack’s jaw clenched and he looked away from Pitch before the man could read anything too unnecessary from his expression.

“You just admitted to being afraid of me.”

Jack glared at the change of subject and the hint of amusement present on Pitch’s face. “One time. You were doing all that weird silhouette stuff and popping out of walls and shit. I ain’t scared of you anymore, though.”

A challenge sparked in Pitch’s eyes, but before Jack could be made to regret his every waking decision, Yves made a grand and loud show of approaching their discussion. Jack felt his forehead relax and his lip quirk a little at how weirdly thoughtful the man could be sometimes.

And then Yves smiled a smile that promised death and gore and blood to all those who defied him, and even Pitch was backing up a step to get out of the baker’s way.

“Skreek just gave me the good news,” Yves told Jack in a tone that clearly indicated how “good” the news really _wasn’t_. “So you better not go disappearing for another ten years, bony Jack.”

The threat was clearer than cold water, but it still took a moment of Jack standing there nervously to realise why Yves was directing the threat at _him_.

And then he remembered the Guardians gossiping about Yves on the rare occasions they stopped working long enough to sit down for a cup of tea together. He remembered them mentioning a substantial reason for why Yves had never _ever_ , despite being the symbol of one of the most celebrated nights of the year, been considered a Guardian membership.

Because he was absolutely _shit_ at dealing with children.

Jack smiled reassuringly. “I’ll make sure the pups don’t bother you, Yves. Skreek and Phoenix will too.”

Yves sniffed, looking a little less dangerous now, and Jack nearly laughed. This man had a backyard full of creepy monsters, manhandled an entire afterworld of dead spirits for a living, and yet he was awkward as hell around _children_ of all things. Jack supposed the King would probably be able to handle them better – he did have to interact with humans occasionally if a stray spirit tried something nasty on Halloween – but that trait apparently didn’t stick around when the King deflated back into Yves.

With a grateful sigh, Yves gestured between Pitch and Jack. “You two are staying for dinner,” he informed them, before turning and heading back to the other end of the house, where Skreek was waiting nervously in the doorway to the kitchen.

“He doesn’t like children?” Pitch asked as he and Jack watched Yves punch Skreek out of his way and drag them both into the kitchen.

Before Jack’s filter could slide into place, he said, “You’re not the only grouch around here.”

A muscle in Pitch’s jaw ticked, and Jack cringed apologetically. Before he got a chance to try and talk his way out of getting hit by the guy, the Nightmare King stepped back into Jack’s space and said, “Tell Yves thanks but I am not interested in… _dinner_.”

Jack stilled when realised that he was blocking Pitch’s only way out. That Pitch was trying to _leave_. “I don’t think Yves was giving us a choice –”

“I don’t care. Move.”

Jack glared at the flat tone he was using. What the hell was with him? They were having a (sort of) perfectly reasonable conservation a minute ago! “Why can’t you stay?”

Pitch arched a brow. “Why should I?”

Shit. He was probably going to beat Jack up if the frost spirit stood in his way for much longer. Or take up that challenge Jack had unwittingly posed. “Uh… Skreek! He’s probably going to want to talk with you some more.”

_Yes, clap clap. You don’t look desperate_ at all.

The look on Pitch’s face confirmed his thought’s remark, and Jack felt his face grow a little colder, embarrassed that his excuse had been seen through so easily. “Is that all?”

_Just let him leave. Why are you trying to stop him?_

_Because I don’t_ want _him to go so soon_ , Jack thought as he held up a hand to ward Pitch off and blurted, “Is being around us seriously that painful?”

His thoughts positively _growled_ at him. _What you so selfishly desire is the reason you’re so pathetic. Maybe Pitch doesn’t want to stay because he’s in the company of someone who disgusts him. Maybe it’s_ you.

The idea sunk into Jack’s stomach like a stone. A heavy stone. He and Pitch had been together for the whole day practically, maybe even longer since Jack was shit at keeping track of how many hours flew by him. He’d finally gotten Pitch to use his given name, his _real_ name, and they’d had their… not-bonding moment in the forest. Was Pitch seriously indifferent to how they had both sort of gotten along? Even on Halloween before he’d started being a dick? Did it all matter _that little_ to him?

He steeled himself as he rephrased his question, dropping his voice a little lower. “Or is it just me?”

Pitch was glaring at him with wild aggravation by now, and Jack felt something hot and painful well in his chest. He felt sick and he just wanted the bastard to _say_ something.

A sore sense of rawness worked its way into his stomach, and Jack found his mouth opening and words falling from his tongue, dripping, practically, they were so pitiful.

“Am I really that bad?”

He wanted to turn himself into an ice cone for sounding like a whining child.

_But I also want to know the answer._

_Pitiful,_ his thoughts hissed, echoing his own evaluation.

Without bothering to answer the question, Pitch went to muscle his way around Jack. He’d probably fucking win, in all honesty, but Jack wasn’t a doormat and he was officially sick of letting Pitch manhandle their conversations according to his will.

He was going to get an answer out of the guy. Even if he had to get hurt to do it.

With a fist dropped to a fraction above freezing, he forced his palm into Pitch’s chest and stopped the Nightmare King in his tracks. Jack wasn’t all that physically strong, but with the ice stiffening his limbs and the element of surprise, he did a pretty good job of compensating.

“It’s a simple question,” Jack said as Pitch blinked at him with what appeared to be shock and encroaching fury.

_Congratulations, now he’s_ actually _mad at you._

Jack’s hand twitched, his body already regretting his decisions. Probably because it knew that, judging by the way Pitch could swing an enormous scythe around without breaking a sweat, he was probably going to do a great job of beating the shit out of Jack in a minute.

But the rest of Jack (aside from those torturously snide thoughts, of course) was taking a moment to bask in the fact that it was _Jack_ cornering _Pitch_ for fucking once. Frost curled across Pitch’s soft shirt, staining the fabric with Jack’s borrowed element and creeping over the ties and onto Pitch’s collarbone like murky veins. He rationally considered letting up for a moment, so he didn’t do any permanent damage to Pitch’s skin, but the Nightmare King had other plans.

With a snarl, Pitch grabbed hold of Jack’s wrist tight enough to send agony lancing through his arm. He brought his face close enough to Jack’s that he barely had to breathe for Jack’s head to be filled with him. Jack’s arm folded between them, crushed against Pitch’s abdomen, as the warm wrath of his breath gush over Jack’s mouth and chin and neck.

_Fuck he’s too close. Fuck._

A shiver work its way over Jack’s skin, through spine and down his legs.

And then the cruel demeanour Jack so loathed reared its unpleasant head.

“Do your little Guardians even know what you’re doing all the way out here?” Pitch purred, his warm breath coaxing goose bumps to rise on Jack’s cheek. “Who you’re doing it _with_?

He laughed a little, and Jack went still. “Little Jack Frost, sharing smoke with a disgraced noble of the Summer Court.” The gold in Pitch’s eyes flared a little when he saw Jack jerk in his hold. “The poster child of fun fantasying about taking the head off the werewolf commander’s shoulders.” His face drew a little closer and his voice dropped. “The Guardian of Childhood trying to cozy up to the Nightmare King.”

Jack’s eyes squeezed shut for a second to give him a chance to redirect his thoughts from how damn close Pitch was to him. He _knew_ he was a terrible Guardian, if not thanks to his thoughts always reminding him of it, then just because Jack wasn’t an optimistic flake ready to dedicate his life to servitude in a heartbeat. Pitch didn’t have any sort of advantage if he was trying to attack from this angle, but he evidently must have thought it was a decent point if he was bringing it up.

Blunt nails dug into Pitch’s shirt, into his chest where Jack could feel another heart thump evenly against his palm. Ice crack off the material only to be replaced with new, thicker frost, and Jack’s fingers bit in deeper. The grip the man had on him was beyond painful, it would probably bruise like a bitch in no time. But Jack couldn’t let Pitch win this. He could stand the pain, he just needed to find the words to convince this asshole to just _work_ _with_ _him_.

He opened his eyes. “What I do is my own business,” he bit out, “not theirs. Is it so damn hard to understand that –”

Pitch looked like he wanted to laugh at Jack as he interrupted with a mocking, “That _what_?”

“That –” Jack groaned, and his arm seized as Pitch ground a tendon the wrong way. Exhaling a pained breath, he breathed, “ _Fuck_ , Pitch, why do you have to be like this?”

“I told you,” the Nightmare King growled. “Because we stand on different sides.”

Pain. _Pain_. Ugh, his fingers were going numb. “You can’t seriously care that much.”

“I can and I certainly do.”

Frustration exploded in Jack’s chest. He wrenched his abused wrist from Pitch’s grip and exclaimed, “Well I don’t!”

Pitch recoiled as if he’d just been hit by a sledgehammer. Jack swallowed his mounting need for Pitch to just lower his guard and understand already – oh, the _irony_ – and bit out, “I couldn’t give a damn about this great good versus evil thing.”

Jack guessed the Nightmare King didn’t get surprised too often, judging by how poorly he was handling this dish of information. “You’re lying.”

He was calling him a liar now?! Jack glared, angry. “What fucking convoluted reason do you have for that, huh?”

“You fought me,” Pitch snapped, deep lines cutting across his forehead. “Ten years ago you may have started as a neutral party, _Jack_ , but you chose _their side_. So excuse me if I don’t believe your apparently apathetic disposition when you went and _proved_ that righteous little things like you always choose good over evil.”

Righteous little… oh, _now_ Jack was pissed. How _dare_ Pitch make such pathetic assumptions about his character! How dare the guy act like he knew a single thing about Jack based on – based on what, clichés and Pitch’s bitter perspective from his side of the fence?!

“Fighting you back then had nothing to do with you being evil, you damn asshole,” Jack retorted, angry enough that he wasn’t even afraid to stoop to voicing the names he usually internally called the guy. Ignoring the harsh throb pulsing in his wrist, he jabbed a finger at Pitch. “You made yourself my enemy, not the enemy of good, but _my personal_ _adversary_ when you stole Tooth’s memories.”

Pitch shook his head at that, disbelieving. “I gave you them back and you _still_ stood against me.”

Jack swallowed, his anger draining into a pit in his stomach as it burned too cold. It was left down there to simmer, to fester, and he had to work hard not to let the emotion show in his voice when he said, “You never gave them to me, Pitch.”

The Nightmare King looked done with this conversation. “Do you expect me –”

“You used them to back me into a corner so when you rocked up in Antarctica I would be hopeless enough to fall to my knees at your feet when you invited me to.”

The vexed impatience fell off Pitch’s face and his eyes widened a little in shock. The change insulted Jack so much he had to dig his fingers into his staff to stop himself from throwing a fist at Pitch’s face. “Did you honestly think I was stupid enough not to realise that you’d manipulated me all the way to that cliff?”

The look on Pitch’s face told Jack that yes, yes the bastard had underestimated Jack in every way possible. His staff creaked in his grip. “I may not be smart, Pitch, but I’m not blind. And after that, just to cap it all off, you tried to murder the one kid who had ever believed in me. Even after spouting all that crap about loneliness.”

Something flickered in Pitch’s eyes. For once, it wasn’t the gold. “You think I was lying about that?”

“Do you think I’m still lying about this?” Jack countered. When Pitch didn’t reply immediately, he forced out a breath. “Ten years ago, I wasn’t fighting for the side of good. I was fighting you because you _thoroughly_ offended me.”

It took Pitch a few minutes to absorb what Jack was telling him, to confer with his guards about whether Jack was telling the truth, about whether Pitch cared or not if he was. Jack flexed his wrist as he waited, embraced the stinging that shot up his arm. It was a heck of a lot easier to deal with than the tension knotting so tightly in his gut.

_You’ve just listed a brilliant expos_ _é of why he’s a piece of dirt, and yet you still want to do this? Are you insane? He’s going to crush –_

“You’re not a part of this,” Jack muttered, and Pitch finally focused on him again.

“You didn’t turn down the invitation to become a Guardian.” There was still some doubt in his voice, along with deep-seated incomprehension. But Jack couldn’t pick up on the rage anymore.

He didn’t know if that was a good sign or not.

Jack swallowed and with a more civil tone, admitted, “I did at first.”

Pitch’s fingers made their way into the back of his hair. “And the second time?”

“My greatest deterrent –,” Jack cut himself off and nearly laughed. He couldn’t say that, not yet. Pitch would probably leave right here and now if he laid all his cards out so soon. Reconsidering his approach, Jack said, “Your offer of friendship was clearly no longer on the table, so why wouldn’t I join them? They offered me a new chapter for my life. Although their morals are hard to swallow at times, they’re kind to me, mostly. As long as I don’t make a mess.”

His eyes narrowed pointedly, coldly, and the Nightmare King actually flinched. At least he had the decency to remember fucking Jack over so long ago.

Pitch pulled his fingers out of his hair roughly and uttered, “You didn’t join me.”

Jack’s brow hitched. He was about to reiterate his earlier argument, but the Nightmare King opened his mouth again. “At any point. Even in the beginning before I started…”

“Being a complete dick?”

Pitch looked unimpressed, but he didn’t try to deny it. Jack pressed his cheek into his staff and watched the man carefully. He looked so uncomfortable, as if someone had replaced his coat with an exact replica, only a size smaller, and he was trying to figure out what was wrong with his shoulders.

_That’s actually not a bad idea for a prank…_

But now was not the time for that.

“It wasn’t because you’re considered to be on the bad side,” was Jack’s soft answer, because the ugliness of the whole truth was too much for him to admit _ever_.

He could only hope that it was a sturdy enough olive branch to withstand Pitch trying to snap it over his knee as he usually did with Jack’s friendly advances.

Straightening up, Jack peered up at Pitch and forced the Nightmare King to meet his eyes. “So. If one of us cares too much about one side of the coin, and the other has hedged his bets with both sides, the game gets a little less tense, right?”

The man considered Jack’s words for a moment. His eyes narrowed a little when he realised, “You’ll always lose out.”

Jack leaned back and shrugged. “Never know. Coin might land on its side one day. Or split in half and show us both heads and tails.”

That made Pitch scoff, and the Nightmare King shook his head at Jack with a barely amused tilt of his mouth. But although he seemed to appreciate Jack’s awful gambling analogy, his forehead was still tearing down the middle as he thought everything over. His fingers inched up to where the frost still lingered on his shirt, and ice crystals crumbled off his clothes and skin as soon as he touched them.

His face was conflicted, torn and confused. But he didn’t smack down Jack’s offer, didn’t snatch the olive branch from his hand and take a chainsaw to it.

_Victory_? he thought with the beginnings of a tiny, hopeful smile.

 

Having (by some miracle of wit and charm) successfully managed to get Pitch to stick around, Jack corralled the Nightmare King out to the backyard, where a wooden dining table lit up by tiny flying lights awaited them on a patch of dead grass. He really didn’t know why Yves had wanted them both to stay for dinner, especially considering their lacking conventional appetites, but Jack wasn’t going to complain if it meant getting to hang around with everyone for a little longer.

Phoenix and Skreek were already seated when Jack dragged Pitch out into the twilight evening, and Jack had to grimace as he got closer to the despondent scene the two of them were making.

Skreek was picking at his food glumly, the huge werewolf pouting down at his peas wretchedly. Yves walked past and whacked the werewolf on the back of the head with an oven tray, mostly in retaliation for dropping the whole let’s-move-in-together bomb, but also to shock the werewolf into cheering up a little.

Jack took a seat next to Phoenix as he watched Skreek and Yves sneer at each other in what Jack assumed to be a loving manner. Yves seemed to have taken it upon himself to bear the burden of lifting Skreek’s misery-clutching spirits, and honestly Jack was thankful to the man for his noble sacrifice. He thought Skreek was great, he really did, but the awful shift of his moods sometimes put Jack on edge, and until Skreek was back to cracking insulting jokes, Jack wasn’t quite willing to meddle with the werewolf.

Phoenix, on the other hand, he was not afraid of. Even when the fire spirit was trying to out-gloom Skreek with his own morose aura. Jack leaned back against him as Phoenix tried to eat. “Is it weird that I just want to go to sleep?”

Phoenix slid him a look as he chewed. “Is your head back in working order?”

“Yeah. But it’s been giving me shit all day.” In every literal sense he could imagine. “I feel wrecked.”

“Me too,” Phoenix mumbled tiredly.

The placid response jolted Jack off the spirit as effectively as a fireball. He checked out the other man’s face. “What’s up?”

Phoenix didn’t look at him when he said quietly, “You never told me about what happened at North’s.”

What the hell? “I didn’t think it was necessary to talk about,” he said carefully as Pitch swept his coat up behind him and took a seat on the other side of Jack (a move Jack considered another worthy victory). “You made your opinion about the Guardians real clear the other night, so why do you care what happens to them?”

Phoenix snorted as he picked at some pastry with his fork. Across the table, Yves, who had finally taken a seat himself, was watching Phoenix shift around his food with a look that held so much potential for violence it was honestly impressive. “I don’t care. Well, not about them. The same thing might have messed with Skreek’s wolves.”

Jack’s eyes snapped to Phoenix, and he felt the gazes of everyone else on the table follow his lead. Jack inched a little closer to Phoenix, and managed to startle the fire spirit with his proximity when the guy finally looked back at him. “Are you saying this is my fault because I didn’t warn you guys beforehand?”

Phoenix’s eyes shot wide and he shook his head vehemently. “What? No! Fuck no.”

Jack snickered at Phoenix’s horrified expression and leaned back. “I’m kidding. Sort of.”

Phoenix sagged a little. With an unreadable expression, he looked over Jack and Pitch sitting just behind him. “Fucking asshole,” he grumbled, returning to his violated pastry.

_Why are you so upset over this?_ Jack thought as he watched Phoenix take another pathetic bite of his food.

“I will have to clean the barracks before everyone arrives,” Yves announced as he heaped a threateningly large clump of potatoes onto Skreek’s plate. Jack finally let Phoenix attempt to eat in peace as his attention shifted to the owner of the realm.

Skreek looked at Yves apologetically. “You know I wouldn’t ask if there was anywhere else I thought they’d be safer.”

“You have barracks here?” Jack asked in surprise. Where did he keep them? All Jack ever saw when he came here was empty and dead fields cluttered with pumpkin houses and freaky little rodents. And the crows. Ugh, the crows.

“Just through the trees over there,” Yves said, and pointed off to where a line of thick pine trees apparently sealed off a secret part of the realm.

“Why, though?” Phoenix asked with a frown.

“For my wolves, what else?” Skreek answered with a sharp look in his eyes.

“Bullshit,” Phoenix muttered as he went back to his food.

As Yves informed Skreek about all the preparation he’d have to get done in a single day just to further grate on the wolf’s guilt, Jack flickered a look over at the man sitting beside him. He was astonished when he saw Pitch gazing intently at a basket of steaming bread rolls.

“Are you hungry?” he asked curiously.

Pitch tore his attention away from the food and looked down at Jack. It took a solid few seconds for that stare to turn into a glare and Pitch to manage his comeback. “Are _you_?”

_His reply took a little longer than it should have_. He shrugged anyway. “Touché.”

“You know,” Phoenix said, interrupting Yves’s guilt trip. “I never saw any of those piglet spirits you claim to have an infestation of.”

Yves quietened down as Skreek turned thoughtful for a moment. “Come to think of it, I haven’t seen any either in the last few days. Maybe whatever came after my wolves scared them away.”

Jack had opened his mouth to mention the footsteps he’d heard while on his quest for improved mental clarity, when suddenly Yves jumped to his feet and shot a horrifyingly intimidating stare over Jack’s shoulder.

Jack nearly fell off his own chair in fright, swearing to himself that if those weird monsters living in Yves’s fields were coming for him, he’d fucking have words with the man –

But when he turned and caught sight of a bobbing white head and long twiggy legs skipping in his direction, his anxiety was replaced with trickling dread. “Oh god,” he breathed.

He looked back at Yves and saw that the man had settled a deadly look onto Jack.

Shit. “Uh…”

The spirit tripped over a twig near Jack’s foot and fell head-long into Jack’s thigh, then back on its ass on the dead grass.

“Shit,” Jack muttered as Pitch looked down at the creature disdainfully.

What was he meant to do _now_? Yves was going to kill him for letting something foreign into his realm, and now that the spirit had come running right for him, there was no way he could disassociate himself from it…

Unless he blamed it on Pitch. Pitch wouldn’t mind, right? And he was still technically a new guest so Yves wouldn’t hurt him _as badly_ as he would Jack…

Ugh. No, he couldn’t do that.

He awkwardly looked over the rest of the table, and sighed in relief when he saw that nobody looked horrified at the presence of the tiny creature. Phoenix and Skreek weren’t even paying attention, too busy arguing over whether or not Skreek’s stories about the piglet spirits had been a collection of meticulously crafted bullshit.

Yves was making his way around the table, stalking almost, with his gaze passing between Jack and the small spirit trying to bend itself in half to chew on one of its feet. Jack’s wrist throbbed, as if brought back to life by his acute fear of being decapitated by Yves, and he ran his thumb under the cuff of his sleeve to try and soothe it.

When he was standing behind Pitch, Yves knelt down, the single apple left in his apron thumping against the side of his leg. The spirit looked up and locked gazes with Yves in a way that made Jack anxious.

Was it going to try that stupid trick on Yves? Shit, then Jack would _really_ be a dead man –

“What a wonderfully spooky little thing,” Yves said, sounding, to Jack’s shock, a little delighted.

Jack shared a look with Pitch, although it wasn’t by any means a synchronized look. Jack was trying to convey his immense surprise and relief to Pitch as the Nightmare King told Jack with his eyes that everyone here was utterly insane. But the exchange was, indeed, a joint venture at least. Jack had that working in his favour, if little else.

Then Pitch’s gaze dropped to the wrist Jack was nursing in his lap, and his expression pinched slightly. Jack promptly jammed the limb between his legs and turned back to Yves just as an assortment of cawing came from off in the distance.

Yves shot a surprised look out into the dark fields. “It seems to have made friends.”

He then turned to Jack. “What is its name?”

Jack spluttered. “Name? I – it doesn’t speak, so…”

Yves gave Jack a withering look. “That is no excuse. A little scarie like this needs a cute little name.”

Jack bit the inside of his cheek as his mysterious little spirit began to gain an identity. Yves had called it a scarie, huh? Seemed like a fitting title for something so weird and ghost-looking. Jack watched the little spirit squirm on the ground, emulating some sort of worm, and a piece of him realised, by Yves’s interrogation, that the spirit most definitely was not one of Yves’s monsters.

Which left Jack with exactly _zero_ explanations for what it could be, or how it was weird enough to get into Yves’s realm on its own, or what it damn well wanted from him.

As Jack sagged in dismay, Yves looked back down at the scarie with a searching expression. “Do you have a name?”

For once, comprehension – sweet, _sweet_ , understanding – jolted the scarie into an upright position. Rolling onto its feet, it immediately folded itself in half and pushed its head into the ground. The grass was so dead it practically crumbled when anyone walked on it, so the scarie was able to easily draw a line and a little circle in the decaying foliage.

Once it was done with its artwork, it straightened up, overcorrected and teetered back a few paces. Bits of dead grass were stuck in its tuft of hair, and the spirit wobbled its entire body to try and shake them loose. Yves twisted his neck to read the name that was presented to Jack the right way up.

“Io,” they both said. Pitch scowled.

“It looks like an Io,” Phoenix threw over his shoulder.

Jack looked at him questioningly. “How?”

“You have an imagination in that skull of yours, don’t you? His body is the ‘I’ and his head the ‘o’. See it?”

“Ha!” Skreek said with a laugh. “The idiot’s right.”

“Hey!” Phoenix shouted, throwing his spoon across the table at the werewolf.

Jack turned from the escalating conflict as Yves rose to his full height. He straightened up his apron and shot Jack an unhappy but no longer murderous look. “You should warn me the next time you bring something into my realm,” he told Jack in a tone that highlighted that this was not polite advice. “Some spirits might be cute, but they can harbour incredible amounts of malicious intent and I would rather my fields not be destroyed by something smaller than a pumpkin.”

Jack ducked in his head in the face of the lecture, even though he bodily objected to the idea that the spirit – the scarie, Io – was cute in any form of the word. He also had to bite his tongue against informing Yves of exactly what Io could do if it was particularly upset.

And then the end of Yves’s speech finally registered, and Jack looked up in disbelief. “You can grow pumpkins bigger than this thing?” he asked, pointing down at Io, who, minus the absurd hair, nearly reached Jack’s _hip_.

Yves shot him a smirk that was only partly willing to play along with Jack’s change of topic. He wasn’t going to be forgiven too easily, it seemed. “Do you underestimate my farming skills, Jack Frost?”

Jack shook his head quickly. “Never.”

“Speaking of, do you still wish for me to pack up food for your wolves tonight?” Yves asked Skreek as he wandered back around to his seat.

Sighing, Jack swung a leg over the bench seat and extended it out toward Io to keep an eye on the thing. Behind him, he could feel the warmth of Pitch’s shoulder near his spine, and in front Phoenix was radiating nuclear heat as usual. If Jack wasn’t outside, exposed to the cranky winds of Yves’s realm, he would have been baking.

“Yes,” Skreek said gratefully. Then a smirk appeared on his face and he added, “They’ll be over the moon.”

Everyone rolled their eyes at Skreek’s terrible joke, and while Phoenix deadpanned something insulting, Jack decided that Skreek had regained an acceptable measure of his weird personality. The frost spirit cut in a tad louder than Phoenix and asked, “Are you going back tonight?”

Ignoring a huffing Phoenix, as usual, Skreek nodded at Jack’s question, and cast a fond look over at Yves. “Yves promised not to accept any bribe money from my wolves.”

“I did not say I would not accept the money, but merely that I would not stop cooking.”

_Guess there was no hope of keeping Skreek from the pack all night, Xani,_ Jack thought with a small smile.

Skreek pointed a fork at the three men sitting opposite him. “We’ll be moving everyone in all day tomorrow so you lot better prepare your muscles.”

“We’re busy tomorrow,” Pitch said suddenly.

Jack spun so fast he felt like he dislocated his spine. “Who?”

Pitch levelled him with a look that seemed almost _inviting_ , goddamnit, as he uttered, “You and me,” in a tone so low and smooth and _deep_ , Jack knew it was to keep the others from hearing, but it sent a coiling pressure into the base of his gut regardless.

_Where do you get off using that voice on me?_ Jack thought miserably as he covered his face with a cold hand. Was he blushing? Fuck, he hoped not.

Face still half concealed just in case, Jack slid a look at Pitch and twitched a little when he saw the man was watching him curiously.

Ugh.

On the other side of the table, Skreek bellowed, “Phoenix, you lucky bastard, you get to do all the work now!” and Jack used the cover of Skreek’s voice to whisper, “What exactly are we doing tomorrow?”

As the fire spirit groaned in anguish, Pitch smirked, ever so slightly. There was a silver gleam in his eyes as he said, “I’m calling in that favour.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you again for all those kudos and your wonderful comments! each and every one makes me so happy.


	12. The Favour

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Jack's big mouth earns him a date with Pitch and a whole lot of Nightmares

“Pitch, it’s a _Tuesday_.”

“And your point?”

Nervously looking around the forest they were trekking through, Jack felt something akin to doom settle around his shoulders. He’d known his unfiltered, desperate promise would have consequences, but he hadn’t expected them to arrive so _quickly_.

Every tall, peeling tree they passed seemed to be _laughing_ at him, snickering at his misfortune with their rustling leaves and long faces.

He could imagine Boreas – if the bastard had taken a moment out of making people’s lives miserable to check on what Jack was up to – falling off his throne in hysterics.

…on second thoughts, no he couldn’t. Did Boreas even _know_ how to laugh?

Jack skipped to catch up with Pitch’s long strides and tried to reason with the man. “Everyone knows you shouldn’t go world-destroying on a Tuesday. It’s bad luck. _Super_ bad luck. Can’t we _pretty_ _please_ hold out for a little while longer? I still haven’t even gotten Skreek his Christmas cake yet. Can you imagine how upset he’ll be if he dies without Christmas cake? Are you really that heartless?”

Pitch rolled his eyes at Jack’s anxiety and kept stomping over brittle leaves and twigs. He scared a family of tiny rabbits out of their nestled clump and didn’t even spare them a second glance as they scrambled for their dear little lives.

What an absolute monster.

“North’s going to be so mad at me if the world ends,” Jack whined miserably.

Pitch sighed. “We’re not destroying the world. Today.”

Jack tried to feel reassured by that, but the added bit Pitch tacked onto the end didn’t make for a very placating addition.

His staff across his shoulders, Jack hooked his forearms over the ancient wood as he began to take more serious notice of their surroundings. “This place looks familiar,” he eventually realised.

Pitch cast him a look. “I would expect most places to look familiar to someone as old as you.”

“Well, _yeah_ , but I mean recently familiar. Was this where I found you yesterday?”

“You have a keen eye.”

Jack flushed a little under the compliment. But the moment didn’t last long. As soon as Jack began to consider why they were sniffing around the same forest he’d rescued Pitch in yesterday, realisation of what exactly Jack had been rescuing Pitch _from_ yesterday hit him dead in the chest at the same time an eruption of equine screams filled the forest.

Jack’s legs seized so quickly he nearly tripped over. “Oh my god,” he gasped. He looked at Pitch in horror. “You’re going to feed me to them, aren’t you?” He dug his fingers into his hair. “And I followed you all the way here willingly! I can’t believe it. After I set you up with a winning hand on Halloween, _this_ is how you repay me? By offering me up to your Nightmares?!”

Pitch pinched the bridge of his nose. “Jack.”

“We were doing so well! I gave you _olive branches_! And now you’re _beating_ _me with them_!”

“Jack, _be quiet_.”

Jack’s mouth clamped shut and Pitch crossed his arms over his chest. “You’re going to be my bodyguard.”

The panic petered out instantly. _Bodyguard_? “Not… bait?”

Pitch nearly smiled. “No.”

Jack’s relief would have had him melting into the ground if it wasn’t for the screaming Nightmares nearby. But not only that. Was this… was this Pitch’s way of letting Jack know that he understood what the frost spirit was on the verge of screaming at him last night? A small bud of hope lit somewhere near his cold heart and Jack couldn’t stop the excitement from touching his face. “Is this an official position? Do I get a super cool jacket too? Oh, do I have to wear shoes? Coz I’m not that keen on the whole shoe thing. And that shoemaker in the Emporium –”

Pitch grabbed Jack’s face, his thumb and fingers squishing together Jack’s cheeks to shut him up. “Make sure I don’t get eaten by Nightmares,” he warned Jack lowly, and Jack could feel cold rise in his cheeks around the warm press of Pitch’s fingers. Pitch’s eyes stayed on him for a moment more, as if he was evaluating Jack from up close, before finally letting go of his face. Jack let out the breath he’d been holding as Pitch stepped back. “Also don’t get eaten yourself.”

_How sweet_ , a sarcastic thought dripped into Jack’s mind.

“It is,” Jack snapped as he rubbed cold fingers over his cheeks.

Pitch looked at him strangely. Avoiding that look, Jack trudged on ahead before he could be asked anything insulting.

They passed through a few more clusters of dying bushes filled with small black bugs and narrowly avoided getting smacked by a tree branch that decided to snap off the second Jack passed under it. Jack’s footsteps slowed when he spotted a clearing up ahead, uneasy about the prospect of stepping out into the open when the Nightmares were lurking so close by.

Pitch grabbed him by the arm and hauled him over to a tree getting choked by a family of rusted bushes at the edge of the clearing.

With a start, Jack realised exactly where they were.

Pitch’s lair lay right in front of them, as sinister and creepy as it had been when Jack had last seen it a decade ago.

Except, now, the hole in the ground no longer had a bed as an aesthetically creepy doorway. No, instead, it was being guarded by an angry, _hungry_ looking mob of Nightmares.

“Crap,” Jack muttered. “Is this why you bitched out on the smith?”

“I did no such thing,” Pitch lied, like the lying liar the bastard was.

“Yeah sure,” Jack scoffed quietly, earning himself a withering look.

Like a pair of mediocre spies hiding in the shrubbery, they watched as the small six-strong herd of horses prowled the perimeter of the lair’s entrance. Most of the Nightmares were as large as Jack had ever seen them, maybe a little bigger than they had been while Pitch was in the prime of his world-domination scheme. But the one standing closest to the entrance, _that_ Nightmare was absolutely huge. Larger than all the others by several hands. And the other smaller Nightmares seemed to be gravitating around it whilst still absently patrolling the area.

“Did they always clump together like that?” Jack whispered. He didn’t know if wild horses had some sort of innate pack mentality, but he was certain that the Nightmares had never really displayed that sort of behaviour.

“No,” Pitch replied unhappily.

Jack had a brief flashback to the gang-like behaviour he’d witnessed yesterday and grimaced. “How’s your shoulder doing?”

“Is now really the time for this?”

“Don’t be a jackass.”

Pitch stared down at Jack with his half-half eyes and, in a peculiar tone, admitted, “It’s all healed up now.”

Jack shot him a look. “Told you the ice would help.”

“Your fear did a better job,” Pitch muttered.

“What?”

“I said stop talking while we’re on the job.” He nudged Jack forward with his knee. “Go on. We need to get in there.”

In his ice cold heart, Jack had about as much conviction that Pitch was a dirty liar as he had dread concerning their current mission. “We’re going _into_ your lair?”

“Today, preferably.” Although his phrasing sounded unconcerned by the plan, Jack could see pinches of tension near the corners of his eyes.

Damnit, even _Pitch_ didn’t like where this was headed.

Jack swallowed. He knew he could do a pretty good job of fending the horses off, but if they were dwelling down in the darkness in swarms… he didn’t think he alone could hold up against an entire plague of them. “Uh.”

“Unless you can’t handle how dark it is down there.”

Jack glared at Pitch. “I can handle it just fine, fuck you.”

He straightened up out of the bushes and brushed some leaves off his hoodie while he cracked his neck. “Get ready to give me the grand tour of your cowboy smut, Pitch. And it better be good quality stuff. None of that dime store shit.”

Pitch buried his face in one of his hands. “I will kill you if you don’t stop talking.”

“Joke’s on you. Then you won’t have a strapping young bodyguard to run into your battles for you.”

“You seriously –”

“Oi Nightmares!” he hollered, leaping out of the half-dead greenery.

Several dark heads all whipped around to face Jack as he stormed over to their gathering. Just behind him, he heard Pitch curse, and the sound of it made Jack grin a little. “Remember me?” he asked the horses as he spread his arms wide. “You can call me… the Harbinger of Cold and Doom. Or just Jack. But Harbinger of Cold and Doom sounds cooler. I might make that my new superhero name, actual.”

_You’re not a superhero. And it’d be a terrible name choice if you were one._

The leader of the pack started for Jack, scraping its hooves in the dirt like a bull preparing to charge. “Don’t be a spoilsport. Hey, wind!” he screamed toward the sky.

_I hope they tear you to pieces._

Jack laughed as the faintest whistling began above the tips of the treetops. “I might just let them if it makes you shut up.”

Before the Nightmares had the chance to advance within a twenty paces of Jack, the weak whistling turned into a howl that could burst the eardrums of anything too delicate. He silently hoped that the little rabbit family was far enough away from him as the leaves of the trees around the clearing rustled softly before completely stilling.

He dug his staff into the ground and used the wood to brace himself.

The only warning offered was the brief scraping of leaves, before the iciest wind in Boreas’s arsenal, a freezing and unforgiving weapon that reflected the frigid Winter King himself, blasted through the clearing. The Nightmares panicked for a moment before their sand bodies and screams were swept away as if a wall of force had slammed into them.

His hair whipping around his face, Jack had enough of a heart to hope the Nightmares didn’t feel pain as the wind blasted around him. The force of this wind felt like getting hit by a truck, and would have sent the Nightmares far enough into the forest to keep them distracted for a while.

When the horses were well and truly out of his sight and the trees looked about ready to snap in half, Jack let up on the wind, letting the air return to its soothing stillness.

He cast a look back at Pitch as the man stepped lithely over their subterfuge bush and stalked, if a bit warily, over to where Jack stood out in the open.

“If you’re afraid of them, they’re only going to follow us.”

Pitch looked at Jack like he really didn’t appreciate the words of wisdom. But then again Jack _had_ just blown away their first obstacle of the day, so he deserved some civility. Right?

Right. “That’s why you’re here,” was Pitch’s grumbled, yet civil, reply as he headed toward his hideout.

But before they could make their descent, leaves on the other side of the clearing rustled suspiciously. Jack leapt at the sound, aiming his staff at whatever was lurking in the shrubbery.

The entire bush shook, before a twiggy individual emerged one boot-clad foot at a time from the plant.

Jack immediately sagged in relief.

Flailing his arms around his head, probably because of all the damn bugs in this place, the smith emerged like a newly birthed creature, all limbs and awkward angles and light hair sticking up like he’d just been shocked. He aimed a bland thumbs-up at Jack as he ambled over to them, large boots clunking as he walked.

His eyes no longer horrifyingly magnified, the smith rounded the lair entrance and said to Jack, “Next time I try flying my kite, remind me to hire you.”

Jack grinned. “What kind of kite is it?”

“The kind that conducts enough electricity to make everything go boom.”

The frost spirit laughed at how cool and not at all safe that sounded. Pitch groaned. “Hurry _up_.”

Jack pouted at the taller man. “You don’t need to be sour, Pitch. You can call me to make sure your kite flies too.”

“So fucking help me, get in the hole.”

“That’s what he said,” Jack snickered. The smith offered him an emotionless but obviously approving high-five and Pitch looked like he wanted to eviscerate them both.

Although not what he would consider ideal, Jack was forced to head into the lair first considering he was the best equipped to handle an ambush if odds really weren’t on their side today.

Luckily, though, the stars seemed to be favourable enough to not only allow Jack to land on his feet at the bottom of the tunnel (and not in a pile of open snapping teeth) but send Pitch and the smith following directly after him.

_You’re so stupid. They could have sent you down here, caved in the entrance, and left you to die._

“But they didn’t,” Jack murmured as he watched Pitch dust his coat off in two smooth strokes.

Pitch caught him staring and pointed up at the tunnel. “Can you seal up the entrance with enough ice to hold the other Nightmares off for now?”

Jack scoffed. “I’m offended you think I might not be able to.”

The Nightmare King straightened up and with a smirk, said, “Prove it then.”

_I’m getting the feeling I’m too easily baited into things_ , Jack thought as he shot a blast of ice up the tunnel they’d just fallen down.

As he worked, he heard the smith say to Pitch in an uninterested tone, “You two seem to be getting on better.”

Pitch growled at the man. “I didn’t bring you here to listen to your opinions.”

Jack did his best to ignore the bite those words left in his skin. Honestly, he’d thought they were sort of getting along better too. But apparently Pitch still considered the topic of amicable interactions taboo.

Once Jack was done, Pitch made quick work of abandoning the poor spirit. With so many shadows lurking around, and eyes lit with silver, he wrapped a fist of darkness around himself and the smith and teleported them both off to some desolate place in the lair.

“Aren’t you meant to take your bodyguard with you too?” Jack mumbled, glancing around the dark lair cautiously.

Although he hadn’t been lying when he’d said he could handle the darkness – the majority of Pitch’s underworld was super dim, but he could still see enough (in most places, at least) not be completely blinded – the Nightmares could probably pop out of walls the same way Pitch could. Jack needed to be on his guard otherwise he’d be yanked into stolid stone and buried alive in the walls by some dark fiend.

Jack shuddered. “Oh my god, imagination, just _stop_.”

_It has a valid point, you know._

“Ugh,” he groaned, and stomped, with as little fear and as much bravery as he could muster, into the upturned ruins that dominated most of Pitch’s lair.

Walking across the huge stone walkway, a bridge or the corner of a castle wall, Jack couldn’t tell which it used to be, he spotted a group of Nightmares slinking their way purposefully across the floor of the lair. Figuring they were probably headed for Pitch and the smith, Jack threw a bolt of ice down to disperse the mob.

The shard shattered on the stones, and the three Nightmares all turned on Jack. He iced them easily enough despite their dodging and weaving – two while they were still soaring through the air at him, and the last he froze solid just as it had planted two hooves on the stone walkway – and thought, for an optimistic second, that this might not be so bad after all.

And then his brain just had to ruin the moment.

_Imagination, we want an encore._

“Wait, no we don’t –”

But imaginations had an excellent sense of selective hearing, and Jack’s began to conjure for him a work of art so well woven a shiver of paranoia ran down his spine.

He heard the cry of a Nightmare, a _real_ Nightmare, and cursed as his mind began to fill with scenarios of being torn to shreds and left down here in the dark, of the Nightmares mobbing him but never killing him, just leaving him to drown in a sea of darkness and screams and _fear_.

As the real Nightmare came to greet Jack – and attempt to suck out his soul, probably – the frost spirit swung his staff and sent the horse hurtling with a blast of cold off the side of the bridge.

In his head, the swarming darkness filled with glowing golden eyes and terror shifted, suddenly. A crack of white light sliced right down the centre of the imaginary mob and the Nightmares began to back up. Began to part for a figure made of white and rolling blue.

For a Nightmare made of ice.

“Stop it,” Jack demanded, and the imaginary scene disappeared.

In his head, his usually vicious thoughts were stunned into a silence that made Jack more uncomfortable than if they’d been screaming around in his brain.

“That’s what you get for asking my imagination for help,” Jack uttered snidely, but was even more disconcerted when no retort was thrown back at him.

Beneath all the cages that hung open and empty in the centre of the cavern, Jack spotted a clot of shadows form. Setting aside his too-quiet thoughts for the moment, he squinted through the darkness and saw Pitch and the smith appear beside Pitch’s world globe. There were no lights lit on the globe anymore, probably because Pitch was no longer funnelling power into the thing, and the Nightmare King seemed to take a moment to admire the dead world. The smith, carrying a large grey sheet of metal, forced him to step up to it.

But stepping too near to the globe seemed to break whatever sleeping spell it was under, and when Pitch’s shoulder brushed by the metal, an array of golden lights appeared across the bottom half of North America. Pitch glared at the little lights bitterly. He said something that Jack couldn’t hear, but made the smith whack Pitch on the shoulder in an almost friendly gesture.

“I wonder what they’re talking about,” Jack murmured as he rested his elbows on the stone.

_Bastard’s probably whining about how many happy children there are on this planet._

“Looks like that shock from before wore off pretty quickly,” Jack said, annoyed not only at the resurgence of the hostile thoughts, but that in all honestly the thoughts were probably right.

He hated it when they were right.

Out of the corner of his eye, Jack noticed more movement in the shadows. He stood up straighter as he spotted four Nightmares curling around the chains suspending the cages from the ceiling.

“Seriously?” he muttered as they began to creep in silence down toward Pitch and the smith.

Pitch picked up on their presence just as they began to speed up their descent, and Jack brought up a wall of ice between the globe and the Nightmares the second before the sand horses would have made impact.

Sand sprayed across the slick, cold surface, and Pitch looked around and finally noticed Jack.

He caught Pitch’s hand unclench, a ball of shadows disperse, and Jack realised that Pitch had been ready to try and whip out his own waning power to beat back the Nightmares.

“Don’t trust me to play bodyguard after all, huh?” Jack accused quietly, and Pitch frowned up at him.

_He doesn’t even remember_ , Jack thought as the smith, completely unconcerned by the fact that they’d very nearly been mobbed, called for Pitch’s attention. _But would his expressions even change if he did? Would anything change if he did?_

A wary thought trickled into his mind, asking Jack, _If he remembered what?_

Jack smirked at the apprehensive thought. “Not telling.”

Pitch and the smith teleported off to another section of the lair, and Jack wandered along the stone walkway, keeping an eye out for any too-sentient shadows. He kind of wished he could explore the place with more freedom, without the fear of the Nightmares or Pitch’s wrath or the darkest shadows clogging in the corners of the cavern as if just waiting to pounce on Jack.

He traced his staff over the stone eve as he fantasied, in no modest manner, about what these ruins could have been once. How it had tipped at such an amazing angle and ended up buried so far beneath the earth. Frost curled over the side of the ruins and formed an icicle that hung down to the ground at the bottom of the cavern.

“You’re desecrating my home.”

Jack gasped and whirled in shock on the Nightmare King, who’d so silently – he was always such a _creeper_ – stalked up behind him. His heart began packing its bags in a flurry, like a scorned wife preparing to leave her ratbag of a husband.

A hand on his throat, ready to force his heart back into his chest if it actually followed through with its threat, Jack tried to calm his breathing. “It’s called redecorating. And besides, the next time you pluck up the courage to come down here, it would have all melted.”

Pitch considered that as he gazed over at the great wave of ice curling over his globe.

“Did you abandon the smith as well?” Jack asked.

Pitch looked back at him. “He’s busy cutting out the most useful metals.”

Which Jack immediately translated as, “So he told you to get out of his hair because you were looming at him.”

Pitch’s eyes narrowed, and Jack grinned because he knew he’d hit the mark. But Pitch didn’t drop his glare and saunter off as he usually did once handed a burn too hot to handle. If anything, his forehead creased further as he stared down at Jack.

The frost spirit’s grin faded. He looked away nervously, unsure what was going through the other man’s mind. When he wasn’t being petulant or irritated, Pitch was unnervingly unreadable. Hence why, when the Nightmare King moved in on Jack so languidly, as if he were strolling up to a shelf in a supermarket, the frost spirit couldn’t stop himself from stepping back. His ass hit the low stone eve and he flinched.

Pitch made a low noise when he noticed Jack’s discomfort, but instead of backing up, he got right into Jack’s space – probably restaging last night’s show, Jack thought mildly – and slid his hands onto the stone either side of Jack’s waist.

_Oh god he’s so close_ , Jack thought as his heart began to climb again. His gaze latched onto the dark ties of Pitch’s shirt, hanging mere inches from Jack’s face, as his brain reeled in order to try and understand what the hell the man was trying to pull here. “Uh… Pitch?”

“You helped me get what I want,” Pitch said with an odd tone in his voice.

Jack didn’t have the nerve to look up to see if the same inflection was present in his expression. “And?”

“And now I can break that flimsy little staff of yours again and leave you here.”

Startled, Jack’s eyes snapped upwards and his breath caught when Pitch’s gaze locked onto his. But his shock wasn’t in response to the threat. Because that would require Jack’s survival instincts to be on point, and with the time bombs he associated with, Jack didn’t think he was too well equipped in that department.

No, his breath lodged in his throat because Pitch was rehashing exactly what Jack’s head had told him earlier. Had Pitch felt those thoughts the same way he registered fear? Surely not. Those thoughts hadn’t been fear-induced… they just seemed to be a little too in-sync with Pitch’s evaluation of how their mission could end.

_Because I’m a lot fucking wiser than you are._

Jack huffed, exasperated but also a little amused at the self-righteous proclamation.

Pitch eyes flickered down to Jack’s chest, then back to the spirit’s face. He tilted his head curiously. “Hmm? You’re not scared.”

Jack put aside his head’s paranoid assumptions for now. They were just trying to psych him out, after all. Just like Pitch was. “I’m not afraid because I know you won’t. There’s probably a horde of Nightmares waiting for you on the surface and you can’t take them all on your own.”

Jack caught a hint of interest in Pitch’s silver gaze as he added, “You know you need me.”

Pitch made a sound, like a small laugh, and Jack looked at him in surprise as he stepped back, his hands skirting _so close_ to Jack’s hoodie as they left the stone. “I wonder.”

The cryptic response was less than appreciated, but at least Pitch wasn’t gonna try and fight him to prove which of them was right. With the way he was now, Jack was pretty sure he could take the Nightmare King if they were on a nice battlefield on the surface. But down there in the lair, Jack didn’t know which way was up half the time and Pitch could probably fuck with his head decently enough to prove whatever point he wanted to.

“Is the smith nearly done?” Jack asked as he leaned back against the stone. “I mean, you guys stole Africa and that panel he was lugging around beforehand. How much more metal does he need?”

“Does being down here make you nervous, Jack?” Pitch taunted with the hint of a smirk. Jack just stared at him, not about to let the scaredy-cat _owner_ of the Nightmare-filled lair get under his skin. The smirk sharpened. “What he’s cutting now should be the last of it.”

“He didn’t want any of the rusted stuff from the cages? It would make a scythe handle look really wicked.”

Pitch’s sharp expression shifted and became something gloomier. “I don’t need your thoughtful artistic advice.”

Jack rolled his eyes and turned his head away from the asshole. “You’re exhausting to hold a conversation with, you know that?”

Shockingly enough, Pitch didn’t have any sort of snappy reply to defend himself with. Out of the corner of his eye, Jack considered him for a few seconds before asking, “Once the smith is done, is that it? Do you have everything you need from this place?”

Pitch looked a bit stunned at the question, and probably for that reason didn’t offer Jack another sketchy comeback. He glanced over at a darker corner of his lair, and as he thought, Jack added, “Because I don’t want to do this again anytime soon, so –”

“It’s fine,” he interrupted, shaking his head. “It’s safer here, anyway.”

Jack’s curiosity spiked. “What is?”

But things were never that easy, and Pitch was already summoning shadows from the cavern walls. “Meet us at the tunnel,” he ordered, and disappeared into a (dramatic, because honestly it was) waterfall of shadows.

Screwing up his face, Jack kicked some stray shadows away from his feet. “The dark and mysterious thing is starting to get annoying, Pitch,” he muttered as he turned back toward the entrance.

Only to stop cold at the sight of a Nightmare waiting not three paces ahead of him.

Jack swallowed a startled curse, a little freaked out that it had gotten so close to him without him noticing (guess they inherited that annoying trait from their maker). But at least this one hadn’t come with the entire flock.

_Although that means the rest are probably about to creep up the walls and chew my face off_ , Jack thought as he quickly scanned his surroundings with his peripheral vision.

The Nightmare in front of him made a sound at Jack, like a whine almost, and the frost spirit geared himself up to ice this one like the others and get going to the tunnel.

Then the Nightmare did something strange. It ducked its head, bringing its face just beneath the level of Jack’s own, and the frost spirit froze when he caught sight of the Nightmare’s eyes.

They weren’t like all the others. Not a brilliant gold that existed as a snide little fuck you to the Sandman’s pure dream sand. These eyes were a molten, fiery orange that looked like a dying light but Jack knew, somewhere where he shouldn’t, that the deep hue burned hotter and older than any other shade of Nightmare gold.

“I know you,” he whispered, and the Nightmare tilted its head back up with a proud little gesture that seemed to say, “I know you do.”

In his head, he felt his thoughts begin to manifest something confused, something cruel. He could taste the bitterness of it even before the words formed in his head, and was kind of thankful for the smith’s voice, yelling an apathetic, “We’re waiting on ya, kid!” that echoed through the lair because it snapped everyone back to reality.

The Nightmare’s head whipped around to glare at whoever was interrupting their moment. Utilising the distraction, Jack and rushed by it, rushed by _her_ , but not without sending one last look over his shoulder at the turning creature as he vaulted over the side of the stone wall.

The smith and Pitch were waiting for Jack at the exit point, the former with several sheets of metal strapped to his back with rope, and the latter staring at Jack’s chest with a confused frown.

_He does that a lot_ , Jack thought as he self-consciously rubbed at the front of his hoodie.

Pitch’s attention was quick to snap away from him, and he ushered Jack closer with an impatient hand. “There are enough shadows here that I can teleport us out. You just need to break the ice at the top before we begin.”

Jack suddenly felt like he was standing at the bottom of a soon to be not-so-empty bottle. “If there’s really an ambush up there, they’re all gonna pour down here, aren’t they?”

“Yes,” Pitch said, not even trying to hide the fact that they were doomed if they didn’t get out fast enough.

“So don’t mess up, kid,” the smith said with a look that suggested he really didn’t give a shit if they all lived or died or poofed out of existence right then and there.

_He’s really not an expressive person_ , Jack thought as heavy legs carried him over to Pitch’s side.

Without asking for permission this time, Pitch’s hand slid around the back of Jack’s neck, warm fingers resting lightly over the tip of his spine, curling around the sides of his throat. A finger bushed up into his hair, and Jack felt a shudder trickle down his back.

The smith reached for Pitch’s hand, and the two men grasped wrists in probably the most awkward display of physical contact Jack had ever witnessed. Pitch grimaced as the smith’s hold tightened and shadows began to form around the three of them.

Closing his eyes, Jack reached with his mind up to the top of the tunnel, to the block of misting cold waiting for them at the entrance.

But before Jack could crack the ice, a memory was offered to him on a plate seasoned with frustration and annoyance. A memory that did a very good job of destroying his concentration for a dangerous moment. The frost spirit went rigid as his mind reminded him of the sharpened fingers and the pain, the most _awful_ pain, he had experienced in North’s attic. Agony that had touched him in the same place Pitch was resting his hand now.

Then stability disintegrated as the shadows collected them up, and a sudden, frantic, “Jack!” jolted him out of his memory long enough to remember the one job he had been given.

The ice at the top of the entrance shattered, cold blasting in all directions. Jack felt it fall across his own skin a moment before he was unceremoniously dropped onto hard ground.

He opened his eyes as the shadows finished dispersing, and clawed at the back of his neck with the hand that wasn’t clutching his staff. He could still feel Pitch’s warm touch, lingering like some form of taunting ghost, but now there was pain trying to dig its way beneath that warmth, beneath his skin.

Scraping, bleeding. He remembered the agony and the world slipping into monochrome around him.

“Jack, whatever is happening with you, now is _not_ the time.”

He looked up at the sound of Pitch’s strained voice, saw the man kneeling in front of him. A pull on the top of Jack’s head informed him that Pitch had a handful of Jack’s hair and looked about ready to yank Jack back to his feet by it.

Regaining a semblance of sense, Jack pushed the hand away from his head and with a start remembered where they were, what they were meant to be doing. His head turned away from Pitch and he stared in abject horror at what they were kneeling in the middle of.

Once again reminding Jack that he had a decent career as a prophet if he was still alive after this, what must have been nearly a hundred Nightmares were waiting in a tightly clumped ring around the entrance to the lair. Jack eased into a standing position as Pitch remained on his knees, and began to think that even with his affinity for cold, they might end up being eaten regardless.

_Shit_. He looked over at the smith and his jaw dropped when he saw the man was taking his precious time readjusting the ropes on his back to make his load more comfortable. Wasn’t he concerned in the least about their current situation?!

_And Pitch calls the people_ I _hang out with crazy._

“Can you blow them all away?” Pitch murmured.

Without taking his eyes off the Nightmares around him, which, for some suspicious reason, had yet to descend upon them, Jack shook his head. “They’ll probably figure out what’s happening before the wind gets here. And Boreas might tamper with it if I try to use it again so soon.” Jack quickly looked down at Pitch, and saw that he was frowning in concentration. A hand rose to grab at his chest while the other hovered above the lair entrance.

What was he trying to do?

“You can’t teleport us again?” Jack tried, and wasn’t really surprised when Pitch shook his head. “If you hadn’t been so mysterious about our date plans, I’d have brought Skørj with us.”

Pitch grunted, and Jack had to hand it to the guy’s concentration levels. He didn’t even glare at Jack for the date bit. “This is my problem. We’re doing it my way.”

“Woah, hold up on the ego there, dude. I’m suffocating here.”

“Same,” the smith piped in.

When Jack glanced over at the man, though, he was horrified to see a Nightmare edging its way a little too close to the smith, who was utterly oblivious. Not wanting to disturb the careful peace the Nightmares were currently suspended in, probably waiting for a command from one of the larger horses for an appropriate time to attack, Jack blew a ball of sub zero air at the Nightmare looking to take a bite out of the smith. The cold caught a little on the smith’s clothes, icing up a few buttons on his jacket, but otherwise did a very good job of freezing the advancing Nightmare solid.

“Get out of here,” Pitch said lowly.

As the smith turned and tapped the frozen Nightmare curiously, Jack gaped at Pitch. “Excuse me?”

Pitch nodded his head off to Jack’s right. “The door to the Emporium should be waiting over there. Run for it.”

Offended that Pitch was trying to brush him off at such a critical time, Jack had opened his mouth to object vehemently when Pitch shot him a look and added, “And take some of the Nightmares with you.”

Jack’s protest died in his throat. His eyes flickered between Pitch’s hard stare and whatever his other hand was doing hovering above the lair, and he realised that whatever Pitch was about to pull out of his ass wasn’t gonna be strong enough to take on all of these Nightmares.

“Divide and conquer, huh?” Jack murmured, eyeing a trio of Nightmares who were starting to get rowdy. Phoenix always used to use that technique when they were together, mainly because he was constantly paranoid of being caught in the crosshairs of one of Jack’s blizzards.

He almost wanted to tell Pitch that separation was a boring victory tactic. That once upon a time they’d created black ice on a cliff in Antarctica and they could do it again.

But Pitch didn’t look like he was up for negotiations, and Jack was sensible enough to not start an argument in the middle of a swarm of Nightmares.

“Whatever,” he finally said, conceding. He turned toward the three Nightmares just itching for a fight and pointed his staff at the middle one. “Hey, you.”

The Nightmare stilled, and the golden gazes of all of those around it landed on Jack. “You wanna fight, yeah?” he goaded, and stepped away from the lair. “So what are you scaredy cats waiting for?”

“Probably that,” the smith said casually.

Jack and Pitch looked over at where the smith was pointing, back behind them, and Jack’s knees nearly gave out when another Nightmare emerged from the tree line.

_The leader of this mob_ , Jack figured as the hulking Nightmare stalked onto the scene. The horse would have stood a few hands taller than Pitch on one of his best looming days, its shoulder blades rippling with muscles made of sand and fear. Jack had never seen a Nightmare look so _strong_ before. Or intimidating.

Regardless, Jack squared his shoulders, refusing to be conquered by a grumpy pile of sand.

He stalked around the lair entrance, and Pitch threw him a look that seemed almost grateful.

_It’s gonna kill you. And I’m going to laugh at your grave once it’s all over._

“Why wait?” Jack uttered as he met the huge Nightmare’s gaze. A tremor of apprehension rattled down his spine but he did his best to ignore it. “Go do it now. Don’t know where my grave is but you’ll find it somewhere. Be sure to get lost and die on your way there.”

_Don’t worry, I’ll find it. If only so those false words honouring your pathetic life can finally have a corpse buried beneath them._

Jack’s fingers twitched. “You sure know how to make a guy blush.”

_Look out behind you, loser._

Jack turned and ducked in time to miss a Nightmare snapping at the back of his neck. Drawing a hellish amount of cold into his staff, he swung and blasted the Nightmare into a group of others.

The leader of the pack chose that moment to let rip a scream that shattered through the clearing. Jack had barely enough time to get himself into the air before half of the Nightmares bolted for him, their eyes lit with the hunt.

He soared into the sky, leading as many of them as he could away from Pitch and the smith. He wiped out a line or two of advancing horses with arcs of ice, but they were faster than they used to be, and more merciless as they broke through the remains of their comrades and charged Jack.

As he danced and iced, strafed and iced, narrowly avoided getting his foot bitten off and _iced_ , he cast brief but concerned looks down at the ground to make sure Pitch or the smith hadn’t been murdered yet.

He saw that shadows were bubbling up from the lair’s entrance and pouring like a growing liquid onto the ground. The shadows flooded through the smith’s legs and around Pitch, some bold enough to cascade over his shoulders, and fanned out on the forest floor.

Then curls of darkness began to shoot out and drag screaming Nightmares into shadowy depths.

Drowning them, practically.

Jack swallowed at the display as he used the body of one Nightmare to vault over another and freeze them both in the process. He felt a quiver of unease at how potentially – awfully – amazing Pitch’s move would have been if the man wasn’t trying to draw on a practically dry power source. Jack saw him tip forward a little, one hand still clutching at his chest, and wanted to yell at him to stop before he killed himself.

But the Nightmares he was currently trying to beat back weren’t prepared to let him have a break to go give Pitch a lecture, and Jack had to drop suddenly, free falling as skilfully as he could, to avoid getting minced by a ring of them.

He sent a blast of ice up toward the Nightmares to hold them off, but they were too swift for their own good, and dodged the blast with barely an inch to spare.

Jack groaned and snagged himself on the wind again just before he hit the trees. One of the Nightmares didn’t correct fast enough and free-fell straight into the branches, but the others were quick to change direction and chase after him.

As he flew, he chanced one last glance down at the ground in time to see the ends of the Pitch’s shadows began to fade. A Nightmare snapped the hold a shadow had on its leg, and Jack sent a sweep of chilling cold down toward the Nightmares advancing on Pitch to buy the man a little more time.

He didn’t get to see if his interference was appreciated or not (but really, when was it ever?). Jack’s attention snapped back to his own fight when he saw the Nightmare’s leader tear out of the trees and fly up and right into his path.

“Boss fight, huh?” Jack said as he lined his staff up.

He sent a shot of ice straight at the Nightmare, large enough that it would have shattered any of the other Nightmares. But this one simply snapped its teeth, crushing the bolt of cold in its powerful jaws, and Jack felt a little like fainting.

_What the hell has_ happened _to these things since Pitch has been gone?!_

Then he was flying up, so he wasn’t sandwiched between the Nightmares chasing him and the one waiting in front of him.

_If I can’t freeze it…_ Jack looked down and saw the pack leader scream, briefly, at the other Nightmares trying to get a piece of Jack. The five remaining goons left the chase to go after Pitch, and Jack felt his panic grab hold of his heart and rattle it.

_Damn it._ Damn it. _If I send a sweep of cold decent enough to hold of the Nightmares on the ground I’ll probably freeze Pitch and the smith along with them…_

Not to mention he’d get eaten by the Nightmares in the sky while he was concentrating. Jack’s panic was lining up to properly throttle his heart when a stupidly optimistic thought entered is head.

_Maybe Boreas won’t be unreasonable. Maybe he won’t even notice you borrowing the wind again today._

And like an absolute fool, fraught Jack _listened_ to the idea.

Filling his lungs with air, he shouted into the wind for a second time that day, summoning a breeze strong enough to incapacitate the black horses currently swarming around Pitch and the smith down below.

The huge Nightmare came snapping at him from below, and Jack frantically tucked his feet up and barrel rolled out of the way of its teeth. Whistling grew near, but this time it was a lower tone than usual. Jack glanced over and saw a mist headed toward them and frowned.

Distracted, he didn’t see the Nightmare approach until it had slammed its massive head right into Jack’s gut on a downward spike that sent the frost spirit plummeting. Fear, stabbing and prickling and nauseating, radiating from his stomach outwards, and Jack clutched at the awful feeling as he fell through the sky and into the trees.

The wind picked him up a foot or so off the ground, catching his limbs briefly before thunking him on his ass and thankfully preventing him from breaking all the bones in his body. But then the Nightmare was landing too close to Jack, its massive body kicking up dust as it stalked over to him, and Jack had to be thankful, if for a second, that this monster apparently didn’t like sharing its meals with its thugs because he didn’t think he could deal with _more_.

Jack scrambled back from the beast, sending blasts of ice at its body which did absolutely _nothing_ to its sand exterior.

He began to fear in earnest for his own safety, not just for the healthy limbs of Pitch and the smith. As the Nightmare advanced with terrifying intent, he wracked his brain, eyes darting up and around in search for some sort of exit strategy. But he had never been _good_ at strategies.

_Shit_.

The Nightmare snapped at him, seeming to enjoy the sight of its prey squirming terrified on the ground. But then the approaching wind grew louder, its sound becoming clearer, and Jack stopped moving.

Horror dug piercing nails into Jack’s chest, and he couldn’t breathe. Because the sound he was hearing wasn’t the howl of the winds.

But the rattle of incoming hail.

_…or maybe Boreas will care after all._

“No, no,” he gasped, scrambling to his feet and tripping, sliding, clawing his way back to his feet when the Nightmare tried to rush him. “Hell no, get off me!” Jack smacked the animal with his staff and sent ice colder than he’d ever use on something living into the Nightmare’s legs. The horse tipped, unable to balance on stiff legs, and Jack ran for it.

“Pitch!” he screamed, sprinting back toward the clearing. The sound of cracking ice and frantic hoof beats soon followed.

When Jack finally broke through the tree line, he screamed again and Pitch startled at the sound of his name. The shadow blanket had dispersed from the ground completely, and Pitch was left to work with two whips that looked substantially less sturdy than the ones Sandy had could wield effortlessly. On his other side, the smith was in a crouch and sizing up a Nightmare crawling toward him as if he was contemplating wrestling with it.

Pitch’s look of surprise shifted into downright horror when he realised what was behind Jack. “Why are you leading that – _oof_!”

But Jack didn’t have time to explain why the pack commander was hot on his heels. He leapt at Pitch and the smith, dragging them both to the ground with the force of his weight, and drew up a dome of thick, _thick_ ice over their prone forms.

Not a moment later (a fact that made Jack positively _sick_ with tension), the sound of shattering ice was pelting down outside Jack’s igloo of safety. The ice cracked in a few places, despite at least five inches of strength.

“What is that?” Pitch asked carefully.

But Jack couldn’t answer. Not now, anyway. He was too focused on trying to breathe through his nose and not the hole his heart was hammering through his throat.

_Breathe_ , he told himself. _It’ll be over in a minute. It’ll be over in no time at all. Then we can break out of this coffin sized –_

Jack rocked back onto his ass and squeezed his eyes shut so he didn’t have to see the icy walls of his small – _small_ , shit why had he made it so _tiny_ – dome move in on him.

“Looks like a hail storm,” the smith said. Jack heard the sound of a shard of ice rupturing the dome, and in a brief flash of concern, opened his eyes and saw that the spear-headed spike was inches from the smith’s face.

The smith blinked at it. “A pointy hail storm.”

Jack groaned and closed his eyes again before he could see whatever kick Pitch might be getting out of his raging claustrophobia.

The ice relented after another few moments, and once Jack felt the angry chill leave the air, he knelt between Pitch and the smith and pressed up on the dome’s ceiling, sending cracks splintering through the entire structure.

And like emerging from a cracked shell, he stood and the dome fell apart around him.

Despite the flow of fresh, free air entering his lungs, despite the merciful abundance of _space_ his claustrophobia dispersed into, Jack opened his eyes and immediately wished he could fold himself back up into the ice.

All of the Nightmares in the clearing were dead. Piles of black sand punctured with spears of ice larger than Jack’s forearm scattered the ground, and despite the fact that their battle was over and they were no longer in immediate peril, Jack felt so, awfully, _ill_.

Pitch was staring around the clearing with wide eyes. If he was in any way impressed by the destruction Jack could cause, it was being set aside for the moment by sheer shock.

“Jack?”

The frost spirit hugged his staff to his chest, nausea and a little bit of fear turning in his gut. “It – it was Boreas. I called for wind, and –”

_He gave us shards of ice sharp enough to kill everything in our vicinity. Including us._

“It did the trick, at least,” the smith said.

Jack shook his head. It wasn’t meant to do any sort of helpful trick. It was meant to deter Jack from using Boreas’s winds so freely. He thought, for a terrible moment, about what would have happened if he’d been summoning this wind to sweep through a town, a school yard, to bring snow and magic to children and adults like he usually did.

He was going to be sick.

By now, Pitch had shifted his attention from the dead Nightmares to Jack’s shaken figure. He stood, brushing dirt off the back of his coat as he did so, and offered the smith a hand up (considering he was on his back awkwardly wriggling like an upturned beetle). “Let’s go before more come.”

Jack didn’t want to be here anymore either. “That way, right?”

Stepping over (or through, in the smith’s case) the corpses of the fallen Nightmares, the three of them sought cover in the trees and made their way toward the general direction of their escape pod.

Equine cries sounded in the distance as soon as they spotted the dark door, and Pitch glared around the forest in case anything tried to jump at them. His eyes seemed to land on something off to Jack’s right, and for a moment Jack saw pain lance across his expression.

Then it was gone, and the smith was hurrying on ahead, claiming some vague excuse about back pains as he left them for dead.

A part of Jack didn’t want to look over at whatever had made Pitch’s face twist so painfully. But when a whimper tickled over his skin, his eyes were pulled to the sight as if drawn by a string, and his stomach turned when his eyes fell on a Nightmare pinned to the ground by an ice shard in its back thigh.

Then he saw its eyes, _her eyes_ , and his nausea rose violently when he realised that she must have followed him out of the lair.

“Oh no,” Jack breathed, instantly spinning and heading for the Nightmare.

“Jack, stand back.”

Jack looked over his shoulder and jolted when he saw shadows begin to gather in Pitch’s palms. They were flimsy, transparent things, but threatening nonetheless.

“What are you going to do?”

Pitch spared Jack the briefest glance before the shadows formed into two long spikes. “What do you think?”

The Nightmare made another terrible noise, and Jack’s heart began to thump erratically. He panicked as Pitch moved in toward him, toward the Nightmare, and put his hands out to try and stop him. “ _Wait_.”

The look Pitch gave him was the rawest form of disbelief. “Why?”

The screams of the other Nightmares in the distance became louder. They were drawing closer, elevating Jack’s already trembling panic and spurring Pitch to get this over and done with already. But Jack couldn’t let him kill her, not _this one_ , and he began channelling cold before he had even thought through the consequences of what he was about to do.

As Pitch made to push past Jack, the frost spirit sent a little prayer to his one true god (which was probably Yves at this point in his life), and let loose a blast of cold air that smacked Pitch right in the ribs. The shadows stuttered back into nothingness and Pitch tipped sideways and fell, probably more in shock than anything else.

Jack was definitely going to regret this later.

…But he’d regret walking away even more.

He ran to the Nightmare while Pitch was sitting on his ass in outrage. With one swift move, he dug his fingers into sand around the spike, ignoring, for the moment, the terrible fear that coursed up into his body. He yanked the ice out with one hard pull. The Nightmare made an awfully hurt sound, a true scream almost, and Jack ran his fingers away from the wound, apologising so profusely under his breath that he didn’t hear Pitch come up behind him (not that he ever did, really).

“Move,” Pitch said in a low and incredibly unhappy tone.

Jack flinched. His fingers were splayed on the Nightmare’s stomach, and creeping sensations of fear were crawling up his arm and into his heart. The screams of the other Nightmares were getting closer, he could feel their cries permeate his skin like pins and he was _afraid_ of them. He was so scared he couldn’t move. He couldn’t look behind him either, not at the terrifying expression that Jack could _sense_ Pitch wore. He could barely tilt his head toward the doorway they’d been bound for in fear that it had already disappeared. “The door,” he croaked and shivered.

The Nightmare shifted, moving away from Jack’s hand, and he let out a relieved gasp as the fear drained out of his fingertips and unbound his muscles.

_That’s not fun at all_ , he thought as he convinced his heart not to arrest just yet.

He looked up and witnessed his plan, mercifully enough, actually work on Pitch. The man looked over at the doorway just long enough for Jack to fly to his feet and give him a vicious shove to get him moving.

He was definitely going to get killed for this.

It was also long enough for the Nightmare to pick herself up off the ground and drag herself on three legs off into the trees.

_She’ll heal, right?_ he thought, feeling a little panicked as he manhandled Pitch onward. _She’ll feed and the wound will heal, RIGHT?_

Nothing – not his hostile thoughts, nor his own file storage of factual information – offered him an answer. And by the murder that was radiating off Pitch as he was forced toward the door, he didn’t think he’d get much of an answer if he voiced his question aloud.

They barely made it to the doorway before the frame started to shimmer and fade. The calls of the Nightmares became deafening as Pitch climbed up through the open doorway and Jack stumbled in after him. He turned and saw a mass of darkness threading through the trees, closing in on them before the door slammed shut and the screams of the Nightmares abruptly cut off.

The smith had unstrapped his package and was leaning against his collection of metal in the middle of the alleyway. He whistled a low, “Hoo. What a good workout.”

Jack heaved an exhausted breath as he gave the smith a dirty look. The man was crazy. Utterly crazy. Great help when Jack was trying to insult Pitch, but otherwise completely batshit.

As the smith began to drag the metal toward the Emporium, Jack realised, blearily, that something had gone very quiet in his brain. As though a vibrating hum that had always existed had suddenly turned off. As soon as he consciously recognised this, almost as if prompted by the very act, a thought trickled like acid into his mind.

_You defend Nightmares now?_ it said in a monotone.

No hissing. No screaming. No emotion at all.

And the next second, Jack’s head exploded.

His ears rang as his head filled with thoughts so loud they were screaming at him, tearing pain through his eyes and temples and down the sides of his neck.

_You’re a DISGRACE to the name of the Guardians._

Jack toppled in the alleyway, dropping his staff and falling in a heap so he could grab at his ears and skull. Agony cut through his neck and extended down his arms until his fingers felt like they were being sliced through with knives. His throat felt funny, like he was gurgling. Was he even breathing?

_You know, I have a thousand precise arguments I could end you with._

He opened his eyes as his vision blurred, wavered. The cobbled ground was twisting along with his mind and his pain and it hurt, it hurt _so badly_ he wanted to scream. He could feel the beginning of tears well in his eyes. Or was it blood. Everything was hurting so badly it could have been either.

_But I think I might leave it up to him for once._

And the pain, the ringing, the agony faded into the low hum that nestled itself somewhere in the corner of Jack’s mind. Confused, he looked up in time for Pitch to growl something at him, his eyes so bright and gold and angry, and violently grab Jack by the front of his hoodie.

Jack’s back slammed into panelled wood, and he couldn’t help the small surprised noise escape his throat. Pitch was glaring at him now, glaring with intent that actually had Jack feeling genuinely afraid. The crazy-but-potentially-murder-preventing smith was gone, and even worse, Jack’s staff was still lying on the ground by the door, well out of reach.

_He looks like he’s gonna kill me._

_It would serve you right if he does._

Jack swallowed as Pitch’s grip tightened on him. “What the fuck was that,” he snarled.

Jack didn’t answer him, kept his mouth clamped tight, and Pitch brought him off the wall only to smash him back into it. The frost spirit cursed, his spine protesting the assault, and grabbed at the hands Pitch was holding him with.

“What are you playing at, Jack?” Pitch demanded furiously. “You’ve murdered hundreds of my Nightmares before. Why did you defend that one?”

Another rough shake, and Jack swore at the man. “They’re yours! Why are you complaining if I spare one? If they’re all dead before they get a chance to come back to their senses –”

Pitch growled dangerously, and with a move so fast Jack didn’t have the coordination to counter it, snapped out of Jack’s hold. He grabbed both of Jack’s wrists, fingers biting into the one that still wasn’t quiet healed from yesterday, and pulled them above his head and out of the way. Jack winced at the pull on his sides, at the discomfort of having his arms wrenched too high above his head, at the pain dribbling down his forearm. He felt air tickle the base of his stomach, and fought a little in panic, squirming to make sure too much of his skin wasn’t exposed.

But then a warm hand settled on his throat, and Jack went very still.

“Do you pay attention to what comes out of your mouth, frost spirit?” Pitch uttered as he pressed his thumb threateningly into Jack’s windpipe, as if he could dig his fingers in and stop the air from meeting Jack’s tongue and solve his problems forever.

Jack’s heart began to pound as Pitch kept talking, golden eyes watching his fingers press into Jack’s skin. “If they return to me, then I will have an army again. That is very bad for your Guardians.” The thumb scraped up over Jack’s Adam’s apple, forcing his head to tilt back against the wall to keep his airways open. He gasped as Pitch applied a little more pressure, and the Nightmare King’s gaze rose to Jack’s eyes. “Are you so naïve that you think I won’t turn them on you in an instant? Do you think I won’t use this scythe, that you helped me find materials for, to cut you into ribbons?”

The Nightmare King was silent as he let his threat sink in. Jack swallowed and Pitch’s thumb traced a searing line down the front of his throat, as if searching for the best place to dig in and finish the job. But although rational alarm had Jack’s heart hammering, breath rasping, the spirit was more upset over this incessant _need_ Pitch seemed to have with reminding Jack of how much of a dick he could potentially be. Jack _knew_ Pitch was no saint, he _knew_ what the bastard was capable of, but –

_But what?! Why are you still here you fucking moron?!_

_Because maybe this might be worth it_ , he mentally whispered.

He could practically hear his thoughts laugh. _He’ll prove to you that it won’t be. Just wait._

Although he wanted to argue, Jack didn’t have to wait long for his thoughts to be proven right. An idea – a rotten, repulsive _notion_ – seemed to occur to Pitch just as Jack was trying to mentally defend the dickhead, and Jack’s chest began to hurt as he watched the idea germinate in Pitch’s expression.

The smirk the Nightmare King gave Jack was cruel and self-depreciating, and his voice was laced with cutting cynicism. “Or do you believe that you can beat me like you did before. Is that it? Do you feel so confident in your own strength that you want me operating at full power so you can bury me again?” Pitch dug the tip of his thumb in Jack’s flesh, hard enough to have the frost spirit flinching, and a glint seemed to enter his eyes as he surveyed the pain he was inflicting. “You were the one who told me how I so dearly offended you, so it would be fitting, would it not? Sweet, terrible revenge.”

The accusation stabbed straight through Jack with more efficiency than a knife could ever possess, and without even meaning to, he began to laugh. He choked and shuddered in Pitch’s hold when it tightened in confusion, and dug his head into the wooden wall as a laugh that was a little hysterical spilled from his lips in tiny, breathy, cut-off notes.

Jack knew it was hysterical – knew it because he didn’t feel like laughing at all. He felt like struggling, like putting up a proper fight because his heart was hammering too hard in his chest. He no longer knew if it was trying to tell him that he was in incredible danger, or worse – alert him to the fact that the warmth seeping into his throat was spreading a little too far and his heart was reaching for it, clawing for it, like some starved creature begging for scraps.

He felt like _crying_ in utter frustration because this man didn’t understand. Kept _not_ understanding. And it just made a terrible, shivering, _ripping_ begin inside of him that he couldn’t freeze back over.

So he laughed coldly enough that his desires didn’t dare pour forth, laughed enough that the snide thoughts in his head had to pause for a moment in their smug victory basking and prod the forefront of Jack’s mind with a finger veiled in disgust.

Pitch narrowed golden eyes and Jack decided then and there that he hated that gold. “This is… so funny,” he gasped. “It’s like… we keep talking… at each other… without making… the slightest bit of difference.” He swallowed, chest rising and falling rapidly with the shallow breaths he was barely managing to take. He yanked on the hold Pitch had on his wrists, but the man only tightened his grip, his forehead cut with deep lines as he watched Jack move under his hands.

With Pitch’s eyes roving singularly across his face and neck, with the entirety of his attention focused on the frost spirit, Jack wondered, for a moment interlaced with bitterness, what the great Nightmare King would do if Jack didn’t try to defend himself. If he simply arched his back and spread his legs _just so_ as an invitation, an offering. He could let Pitch take out this frustration on him in a different way, an obscene way. A way that would require Pitch to take proper fucking notice of him for once.

The thought made Jack’s cock twitch in sadistic interest, but it also made his heart _ache_ at the very idea. At the very _thought_ that Pitch might just take him up on the invitation. At the fact that offering himself up wouldn’t guarantee that Pitch would finally _see_ him – a painful truth he had learnt all too well a very long time ago.

So he kept his back against the wall, right where Pitch wanted him to be, and managed to murmur in a single weak breath, “What do you wanna do, Pitch, choke me?”

This time, when Jack pulled on the shackle of flesh around his wrists, he tore his sorest one free. He used stiff fingers to ghost over Pitch’s hot wrist, to run icy fingers along the bones and muscle in his hand until his own grip was mirroring Pitch’s, thumb over thumb against a pale cold throat.

He held Pitch’s grip fast when the Nightmare King tried to move, and pressed forward against their hands. He kept his eyes locked on the gold and silver trying to eat each other in Pitch’s irises, on the confusion and wariness eating away the Nightmare King’s ever-present suspicion and anger.

He dug his nails into Pitch’s hand and uttered, “Go ahead. Nobody’s here to stop you. Then you can finally tell yourself that you were right about me all along.”

Pitch’s eyes flickered between Jack’s, then dropped to the hand Jack had clamped onto his own. Pitch’s wrist flexed experimentally, muscles moving beneath Jack’s fingers, and Jack’s expression contorted as pain punctured through his throat and his air was cut off for good.

With an audible swallow, Pitch abruptly let go, two warm hands jerking away from their captive prisoners. Jack coughed, gasped as air poured back into his starved lungs, and felt like screaming at the man to just making up his fucking mind already. To stop playing tender one second and cruel the next. He wanted Pitch to stop messing with him and figure out whether he wanted him dead or alive and _stick with one_.

Jack looked up and nearly started laughing again. Pitch was watching him with a revolting amount of caution, as if the fact that Jack could let him so close scared _him_. The frost spirit stared icily at the man as he rubbed the soreness in his neck.

With a last cough to clear his throat, Jack said coldly, “I don’t have the patience or the brains to manipulate you into building yourself back up again just to knock you down.” Although he was trying to keep his tone as level as he could, even to his own ears anger was threading into his words like off-colour stitches. Pitch could hear the anger too, and his own expression twitched, as if he was preparing himself to react to Jack’s rage. To retaliate before he even listened. Jack let his hands drop from his throat and his eyebrows drew together in frustration. “If you took just one moment out of your pity party to actually remember, _the Guardians nearly didn’t win that war_. One man and a bunch of sand had the four of them backed so far into a corner they had to ask _me_ for help, and even then we did shit all against you.”

He took a breath through his nose, an attempt to calm himself that didn’t work as well as he’d hoped it would. “But you’re right, Pitch. You lost. But you also paid for it. I’m not petty enough to scheme for ten years just so I can make you suffer even more than you already have.”

Jack pushed off the wall and stepped up to Pitch, close enough that he had to crane his neck to keep hold of the gold-silver stare that had fallen irritatingly empty of anything readable. But Jack wasn’t going to be deterred by Pitch’s dead gaze, not when he had the perfect chance to help Pitch make his all-confounding, oh so difficult, _Do I like Jack better when he’s breathing or not?_ decision.

In a harder voice this time, Jack said, “So feel free to continue thinking that I’m just some dumb, naïve idiot panting after you. But stop saying stuff even _you_ don’t believe in.”

The ridge of Pitch’s brow hiked in incredulity. “Oh?”

“Yeah, _oh_. If you really thought I was on some elaborate revenge escapade, then why are you still bothering with me? If you want me dead _so badly_ , then why am I still alive? You keep saying you’ll turn your scythe on me, and yet you didn’t the last time you had one in your hands, did you? You didn’t leave my body to rot in your lair, and you haven’t strangled me despite being given the perfect chance to.” Proving that the man had ears that miraculously _worked_ , Jack’s point had Pitch’s expression pinching. He cast his eyes away from Jack angrily and the frost spirit slumped back against the wall.

“Stop looking for reasons to hate me because it’s getting old,” Jack said, and Pitch’s entire body tensed. “And stop pretending like you understand anything about my motives.”

Pitch made a loud, frustrated noise and slapped his hand against the wood above Jack’s head in an open-handed punch. Jack twitched instinctively, feeling the figurative impact of a hit he was pretty sure was intended for him, and Pitch snarled at him, “I don’t understand a single thing about you, Frost.”

It took everything Jack had to keep his forehead from crumpling – to keep his expression from moving at all. He could have sworn he heard something that was more broken than anger litter the edges of Pitch’s voice, but even if he had, the Nightmare King’s words were enough to deter Jack from trying to seek an impression of hope in his lapse of anger.

They breathed at each other in the silence that followed Pitch’s words, livid and confused exhales entwining together before dispersing, like everything Jack tried to achieve, into nothing.

Jack was done with this fight. He was done with this day. With yesterday. With this _week_. He put a hand against Pitch’s chest, over the place where the guy was supposed to have a heart, and applied pressure. Pitch winced, allowed himself to be moved back, and Jack pushed past him to get his staff.

With the cold tickling his skin once again, Jack’s eyes slid to Pitch as his hand rested on the doorhandle. “You know what? If you want to cut me into tiny little bloody pieces, then take your best shot. At least then you’d stop doing a better job of ignoring me than the humans do.”

And he stepped out into an overcast afternoon, letting the doorway and Pitch fade into nothing in his wake.

 


	13. Two Little Scaries

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Pitch has to deal with a bunch of rude customers, and Jack stumbles upon two teary individuals.

Pitch’s eyes remained on the closed door for longer than they should have.

Jack’s last words churned through his head, rolling like thunder armed with needles of sound that stabbed his conscious thoughts relentlessly. The words and that _anger_ left behind tiny, bleeding, swelling holes of frustration and confusion and, the darkness help him, _guilt_.

He tore his gaze away from the door and let his head fall against the abused wall. The wood was on the very precipice of rotting away, held in perpetual near-death by Inari’s magic, and Pitch found it in himself to be surprised that it took his hit earlier without crumbling under his fingers. The faintest scent of decay passed under Pitch’s nose and he clenched his eyes shut, pressing his forehead harder against the wood until he felt splinters bite at his face.

The frost spirit was mad – madder than he had ever seen him. And _hurt_ – _fuck_ , Pitch barely had the emotional capacity anymore to deal with this sort of thing. Once, a long time ago, he had owned enough of a heart to be able to understand others. It would have even been enough to parse the pain that had flashed through Jack’s eyes before he had begun to laugh so chillingly. He could have dissected it and conquered it before Jack had gotten the chance to slip cold fingers between his and _provoked_ Pitch until he'd reached a limit he'd never realised he had.

Even worse, he would have once had the courage to take the frost spirit at his word and trust him.

Pitch exhaled a hurt breath and pressed a hand into his throbbing chest. Apparently he still had a heart, but nowadays the only use it seemed to have was to ache with a resolute determination that could be commendable in any other situation. The pain was on the verge of breathtaking, and he realised (with hindsight) that exercising so much power against his Nightmares was a punishing decision in itself, but this – this _pain_ was excessive. Excruciating. It drew a taut tension from the bottom of his throat to the top of his gut and wound it so tight Pitch could imagine it snapping and bursting free from his ribcage along with the rest of his organs.

His free hand twitched where it rested against the wall and Pitch opened his eyes to stare at it, to see the streaks of mottled colour and melting ice Jack had left on his skin.

They had done this just yesterday, hadn’t they? To a lesser extent, but violence was violence and if Pitch got a hold of Jack again he’d probably find bruises curling around the frost spirit’s wrist. By the time the sun fell tonight he would definitely have marks from today as well, and as much as the mental image of purple hues discolouring Jack’s pale skin might appeal to his more malicious side, something was sitting uncomfortably in Pitch.

He had a terrible feeling that it was same thing that demanded he let go when Jack’s airways finally closed, the same _thing_ that was so easily taken by the sight of the frost spirit begging for his help, that loathed the sight of that lotus in Jack’s chest.

Pitch groaned and sank into a squat at the base of the wall. Whatever this inclination was, Pitch wanted nothing to do with it. He wanted nothing to do with anything the frost spirit had tied him up in, including these disgustingly sentimental proclivities.

He needed to hack his way out of this mess before he got himself tangled too deep because he didn’t _need_ this. He didn’t need to be concerned over the fire spirit’s flighty behaviour whenever Pitch was around him, nor over whatever insane event had happened to the werewolves and apparently also to North’s hairy henchmen. 

He didn’t need the icy fire Jack got in his eyes when he was determined or downright furious, a fire so cold it made every one of Pitch’s rational thoughts mutate into something heinously unnecessary. He didn’t need the spirit’s incessant rambling or the fact that he gave a damn about whether Pitch lived or was impaled by a dozen shards of ice.

His fingers dug into his chest and Pitch breathed slow, meticulous breaths as the pain finally began to ebb.

He didn’t need anything Jack had brought into his life.

_So why haven’t I abandoned it yet?_

He swore quietly under his breath. His board of impulses – his bloodlust, his pride, their combined need for domination and submission and destruction – had most definitely excused themselves for a prolonged recess, and Pitch was certain they were thinking of turning on him.

“Of course they would,” he murmured against the dead wood. “What use would they have for such a weak king?”

 

The Emporium was…busy.

When Pitch finally worked up the nerve to enter Inari’s dungeon of smallgoods, he was greeted, to his dismay, by several more stallholders than he was entirely comfortable with.

Everyone save for the illustrious (a self-appointed title) seamstress was present that day, from the tri-horned animal tamer to the shifty chemist who had long ago nailed his stall to a wall and informed Inari, from behind a gasmask, that everything he mixed was perfectly safe so their life-long contract wouldn’t cause any major disturbances.

The Nightmare King was still brainstorming ways to get rid of the freak.

With Pitch’s metal laid out across his table, the smith propped an elbow on a country in northern Africa and pointed around Pitch. “What’d you do to your other half?”

Inari, the nosy spirit, snapped her head up from the log she was writing in and her gaze pierced straight into Pitch. “You mean that cute little frost spirit?” she asked with the beginnings of a grin.

Pitch gave Inari a withering look, which he immediately cast onto the smith when the man started talking in his usual bored tone. “He was looking pretty badass today. Had it hailing ice that was so sharp it skewered everything in the forest.”

Inari’s eyes positively _lit_ at that. She concerned him so very much sometimes. “Ooh! You didn’t tell me he could do that, Pitch!”

He _can’t_ , Pitch thought as he remembered the fear in Jack’s eyes as the spirit had come sprinting for them. The taste of Jack’s fear in those seconds, the sensation of the spirit’s distress over the danger headed for the smith and, specifically, for Pitch – _dear darkness_ , the taste still haunted his tastebuds, unpolluted by the acid he’d been spitting at Jack in the alleyway.

The fear had been so shockingly sweet. It’d glided down Pitch’s throat, satisfying him in such a different way to the usual terror he craved. But just as it was so sweet, Pitch was acutely aware that it was equally rare.

Which gave him an even greater reason to cut the frost spirit loose, if only so he wouldn’t acquire a taste for something nearly nobody on this earth had the mind to offer him.

Feeling Inari’s probing stare, Pitch shrugged as nonchalantly as he could. “I didn’t know either.”

The smith looked between them. “Do you two gossip about the kid when the rest of us aren’t here?”

“We do,” Inari said, nodding excitedly even as Pitch glared at the woman for blatantly lying.

The smith waved a hand at Inari. “Invite me to your next session. You won’t be disappointed. I’ve heard some great things about him.”

The fox spirit perked up in interest. Too much interest. Pitch was really regretting ever having met her. “Like what?”

The smith shrugged. “Lots of things. I smith weapons for all sorts of despicable people, and sometimes I have to custom make them for particular situations.” Goggled eyes flickered to Pitch, and if the smith could experience emotions, Pitch was positive there’d be some evil satisfaction rolling around in those orbs. “Like defending against a freelance spirit with Boreas’s arsenal at his disposal.”

Pitch snorted. “Jack’s a Guardian, he’d be –”

“Oh, this is way before that. Nearly two centuries ago.”

The Nightmare King took that in for a moment. So long ago…Jack had had people seeking protection _because of_ him? How come he’d never heard of that before?

Maybe the frost spirit had been some sort of vigilante when he wasn’t messing around with human children. But even then, wouldn’t someone have warned Pitch of such a threat?

Then again, the villains of this planet _were_ despicable. He wouldn’t trust any of them with his socks let alone with important information regarding who was out for his head.

Inari giggled behind the sleeve of her kimono. “Ohoho, you’re definitely invited, smith.”

As the two of them bartered over a meeting time like the pair of savage salespeople they were, it began to properly dawn on Pitch that he truly knew hardly anything about the frost spirit. He’d spent these last ten years stewing over his defeat by a Guardian defined by fun and snow, and it had barely even occurred to him that being alive for three hundred years was long enough to have experienced a great deal of things in life – both good and bad.

Having been alive a lot longer, Pitch knew that story all too well.

But although Pitch _knew_ he had little right to assume anything about Jack, he just couldn’t _stop_ his mind from turning over every chance it got. Just in case the spirit’s grin was a lie or the anger was an act or the way his cheeks darkened whenever Pitch touched him in anything but anger was a trick. His survival instincts didn’t want him to let his guard down, and they kept replaying the scene of Jack _defending_ that Nightmare over and over again as proof that he shouldn’t lapse into any false sense of security.

But Pitch was clued in enough to realise that sometimes they also didn’t know when to quit.

The guilt stabbed him again, tiny needles drawing blood, and Pitch rubbed at his chest tiredly.

_That boy’s ruining me, I swear._

“Tch,” the smith muttered. Pitch extracted himself from his own revolving thoughts and turned to see the smith staring toward the door. The rest of the stallholders had fallen into a suspicious hush. “What do these bootlickers want?”

Pitch glanced over to the stairwell and scowled at the mob of masked, cloaked Imperials darkening the Emporium’s doorway. “Nothing conducive for business, I suppose,” he replied as three made their way over to Pitch and the smith. Another two began waltzing around the store, eyeing off the stallholders and their goods like they were one and the same, while the last hung back. Pitch instantly didn’t like the look of him. Or the sword he was carrying.

“Pitch Black, fancy seeing you in such a humble setting.”

Oh, they thought they were smart, did they? The Nightmare King smiled without teeth. “Welcome to the Emporium.”

The faeries somehow unanimously decided that Pitch would be their first port of call, and suddenly he had three of them standing in an arc around him. They were shorter than him by at least a foot and a half, which was a benefit that Pitch took full advantage of by staring down his nose at them all as they talked in their revoltingly posh court accents.

“The Pitch Black that scares children for a living? Ha.”

“So, _Boogeyman_. How’s your new life as a salesperson treating you?”

“Or is this just a side job while you hatch another scheme to defeat Santa Claus and his merry ring of friends?”

Pitch breathed in through his nose, exhaled through it too. Inari had once given him a book as a welcome-to-your-new-job gift that outlined one thousand and one ways of handling irritating customers.

He still hadn’t read it.

But it was not as if he was even annoyed at the customers themselves. What Pitch hated the most in this situation was, in fact, _not_ the trio of insufferable faeries prodding at him like a piñata.

No. Truthfully, not for the first time, Pitch found himself cursing Inari and her strict work policy dictating all the ways Pitch _couldn’t_ have fun with these idiots. She had even added a few more once she’d employed Pitch and he had discovered how irritating shopkeeping truly was.

_Although I might have used one of those methods on Jack the first time he visited_ , he remembered.

But since the owner herself was present (and being peered at by a masked faerie, to Pitch’s deep annoyance) he had to choose to remain cool and unconcerned despite his mounting rage.

The faerie at the spearhead of the trio snickered like some dirt bag of a child. “Looks like getting a humble job has finally put you in your place, _Nightmare King_.”

His patience gave up its act.

Pitch’s eyes snapped to the sockets of the faerie running his mouth, and a bloom of bright fear sparked in the man’s chest. The Imperial made an alarmed sound as the fear spread, and his two companions looked at him. The rest of the Imperials instantly went on alert, and managed to drag themselves away from poking things off the stallholders tables long enough to look over at what was happening at the front of the shop.

There was the sound of metal scraping against a sheath, and suddenly Pitch was staring at the side of a very, very silver sword.

He looked to his right, letting the Imperial in front of him relax, and glared at the faerie who thought it was a bright idea to hold him at sword point.

_The next time I have a chance to take over the world, I’m annihilating the fae Court first._

“Pitch,” Inari sniffed. Started by the sound of the woman _crying_ of all things, Pitch spun, ignoring the swordsman and the over-polished weapon, and saw that Inari was sobbing quietly into the sleeve of her kimono.

The faerie who’d been sniffing around her backed up when they realised what state Inari had descended into, and Pitch pierced the irritant with a sharp look.

“What do these masked people want from us?” Inari cried, tears rolling down her furred face in streams.

At once, the stallholders began to move and rustle about. The swordsman went to leap to the defence of any one of his colleagues, but his abundance of chivalry wasn’t going to be of any use. The bookkeeper and the beast tamer, the snarling shoemaker and the gurgling herbalists, even the kook of a chemist, all gathered around the distraught owner of the Emporium like a collective shield. The shoemaker hissed off an Imperial who stepped too close to him and all the stallholders began to coo and shush at Inari in their own strange ways.

The beast tamer offered her a tiny gecko, which the shoemaker slapped out of his hand in irritation. The gurgling herbalists offered withered flowers, the bookkeeper some dust from his shelves, and the chemist a vial of something pink that Pitch was pretty sure he shouldn’t be waving around in the presence of the Imperials.

Pitch looked away from the scene and glared down at the faeries in front of him. One had turned to the smith during the great migration and the weapon smith was currently having an intense one-sided conversation with the faerie a garbled tongue that Pitch didn’t recognise one syllable of.

“You heard the mistress,” Pitch said down to the Imperial. “What do you people want?”

“I paid my taxes!” Inari wailed over her crowd. “I paid all of them! They were so rude to me but I still did it!” The sobbing got louder, and Pitch heard the shoemaker offer in a hiss to make her a new pair of slippers.

The Imperial squared off with Pitch and, like he really didn’t want to be having this conversation with Pitch at all, said, “There’s been trouble with one of our realms. Do you know anything about the Holomire’s forest?”

Pitch raised a brow at that. Then he looked sideways at the sword bearer, and had a strange feeling that this mob of Imperials was conducting an inquisition.

And since faerie inquisitions always came with nasty surprises, Pitch opted to go with the truth rather than a vague answer. “Only that they’re anti-social tribes people.”

The swordsman sheathed his sword as the first Imperial kept talking. “The exclusivity of their realm is bound by the condition that they keep an accord with the official Court, but when messengers went to pass through the wards last month, no one let them in.”

And divulging all this information to Pitch was helpful…how? “Maybe they don’t want to be your friends anymore.”

The smith snorted. When all the Imperials turned to him, he quickly hid the noise with a repulsively loud, phlegm-filled cough.

A few shook their heads in disgust as they turned back to Pitch. “They have no choice in the matter,” the Imperial said ominously. Then he looked around Pitch at the gathering at the back of the store. “If anybody else here has information on the Holomire people you are required by law to tell us. Is there anything anyone has to say?”

There was a pause, interrupted only by Inari’s meek sniffling (which Pitch was considering suspiciously since the woman didn’t have a drop of distress in her chest). Then someone raised a slightly trembling, translucent arm.

The bookkeeper.

In a tittering, grating voice, the bookkeeper said, “I recently sold a copy of _The Compendium on Natural Born and Naturalised Languages of All the Fae Realm_ volume fifty-eight.”

Pitch realised with a small start that he’d been the one who sold that copy. _To Jack_.

The Imperial sighed in exasperation. “What does that have to do with our investigation?”

Oh, so they were calling themselves an investigation? Pitch felt like asking them if they enjoyed pretending to be detectives when they weren’t lapping at the boots of their superiors, but at the last second decided against it.

The bookkeeper adjusted the glasses on its opaque head. “Well, they are very helpful books, even if their author was a rather questionable –”

“Answer my question directly or not at all,” the Imperial thundered.

The bookkeeper flinched and quickly said, “It is a lexicon for the Holomire language. Just…a coincidence, that is all.”

The bookkeeper began sobbing along with Inari after that, and the owner of the Emporium welcomed the keeper into the folds of her kimono as they bawled in each other’s faces.

_I regret ever agreeing to work here_ , Pitch thought as he pinched his nose.

The Imperials, on the other hand, unfortunately did not look like they were bemoaning marching their way into the Emporium. A few conferred with each other before turning back to Pitch. “Did you keep a record of who the book was sold to?”

Although in the middle of some sort of emotional fit, Inari had enough of an ear on things to answer for Pitch in a croaky voice. “We don’t keep any histories or details of our clientele!” she blubbered in their direction.

“Convenient,” one of the Imperials muttered.

Inari glared at them around a clump of tissues and a wilted tulip. “Not for you maybe!” she exclaimed. “But this is how I’ve always done business! It was how my grandmother ran this shop before me! I refuse to insult the name of my – of my –”

A weak hand was waved toward the middle of the shop and the sobbing recommenced.

Although these idiots had probably been trained for uncomfortable situations, apparently the sight of a fox spirit wailing over her dead grandmother – and the morbid implication that perhaps the statue in the centre of the room was of the mentioned, beloved grandmother – was a little too much for them all to bear.

Grunting, the Imperial closest to Pitch was handed a folder and promptly dug through it.

“Before we go, have you had any recent contact with any of the names on this list?”

The paper that was shoved in front of Pitch’s face comprehensively offended him, and he snatched it out of the faerie’s hand to read it properly. As his eyes scanned the list, he heard the Imperials mutter to each other and Inari’s weeping increase in volume.

And then his eyes hooked onto two painfully familiar names.

_Jack Frost._

_Phoenix Von Cinder._

And it took everything Pitch had not to react, not to screw up the paper in his hands, throw it into the chemist’s Bunsen burner and set the Emporium on fire just so he didn’t have to tolerate their scrutiny anymore, so he didn’t have to decide whether he should answer in truth or not.

He didn’t dare look over at the swordsman again, because he could already feel the faerie’s eyes on him and Pitch was pretty sure that _he_ was this inquisition’s nasty little tag along…

_Shit. Just as I’m considering untangling myself from the damn spirit…_

He flicked his eyes over the list once more before handing it back to the Imperial in front of him.

“Well?” the Imperial prompted.

But all that was going through Pitch’s head was, _What the_ fuck _am I meant to say?_

 

* * *

 

Jack was an idiot.

Wandering through a town made of stone and snow, he was angry and he was upset. He hated himself for hoping that maybe Pitch wasn’t as dense as he looked, that maybe if Jack was nice enough they could start over again. Without manipulation, without the world at stake.

He was even more of an idiot because he kept letting his eyes _catch_ on anything tall and black, on anything dark at all, in some vain hope that maybe Pitch had followed behind him. Maybe the bastard cared enough to realise that Jack wasn’t stupid and he was _onto_ something. He _had_ to be.

Why else would Pitch tolerate his company so often? Why else would he wield weapons and not use any of them _on_ Jack? Why would he indulge in Jack’s requests, smile at him sometimes, _help_ him?

Pitch didn’t hate him as much as he thought he did. It was the only logical conclusion Jack could think of besides Pitch harbouring some colossal _plot_ that required Jack to be alive for it to work. But stupidly suspicious thoughts like that just didn’t make sense because Jack could _see_ in Pitch’s eyes the genuine confusion, the genuine confliction every time they fought. Pitch was a schemer but he wasn’t a good enough of an actor to pull that shit off.

Jack sighed and rubbed at his abdomen, where flecks of throbbing pain were _still_ , hours later, reminding him of that Nightmare’s brutal head-butt. He was getting tired of Pitch refusing to just let his guard down for a single second. He was tired of being offended and hurt every time Pitch went as far as to fight him to maintain the walls he had built up around himself.

_Maybe now you’ll realise that he doesn’t give a shit about you_ , his thoughts chimed in cheerfully.

“I don’t need to hear your damn gloating,” Jack said as he sagged against the rough exterior of a stone house.

Wherever he was in the world, the streets were lined with snow as deep as Jack’s ankles, interrupted only every now and then by footprints here and there. Sometimes he wished he left footprints behind him in the white snow, if only so he’d have more proof to show kids that he wasn’t just a made up story. But the snow knitted back together as soon as his foot left its place, erasing Jack’s presence without even asking his permission.

He kicked at the white fluff, sad and pissed off at the snow, at Pitch, at Boreas for raining down hell on them when Jack had only wanted a defensive gust.

_Blah, blah, more whining, blah. Congrats, you’ve had an epiphany and now recognise how stupid you are. Now go back to North and –_

A door slammed open just down from Jack, and he peeled himself off the side of the building in time to catch two humans drag what looked like a carpet out of the house.

“Why does it take two people to carry a carpet?” he huffed. But just as he was turning and preparing to leave, red on white caught his eye and Jack froze.

Was that…?

The carpet was bleeding, red streaking behind it as the humans dragged it toward a car parked on the other side of the street.

Jack looked around, wondering why anyone wasn’t stopping these guys, and his stomach clenched when he realised the crescent he’d wandered into was completely deserted. He looked to his side and saw that the house he’d been leaning against had boarded up their windows, and eviction notices littered the mail slots on several doors.

Snow littered down from the sky as Jack watched the body leave a crimson trail in its wake. Through the snow, through Winter, this was what Boreas watched on a daily basis. He never interfered, never intervened, just helped hide the streaks of blood with more pure snow.

Jack could barely stand how much he hated the Winter King. And it was times like these that the feeling became almost intolerable.

He stepped through the self-healing snow and toward the humans desecrating a corpse with a rug. They both wore black beanies over their heads as they worked, even though not a soul was around to witness their undertakings.

Jack had half a mind to freeze them solid before they could complete their job.

But before he could try, something small and cold suddenly bumped into his legs and Jack jolted in shock.

He looked down, partially expecting Io to be down there grinning up at him like usual. Or maybe getting ready to turn his brain into mush considering he didn’t bring the thing along on their trip today (but he had _asked_ Io, only to be dumped when the crows called the creature to go play with them).

What he wasn’t expecting, in any form at all, was another little spirit shivering from the cold with its tiny face pressed into Jack’s calf. Startled, he knelt in the snow and the thing looked up at him. It was dressed similar to Io, twiggy black legs and a body that looked to be draped in a white cloth. But this one had four short legs instead of two long ones, and without a long neck and a melon of a head, it barely reached Jack’s knee.

Two black eyes stared up at him, and a tiny little “ _mip_ ” sounded from a mouth Jack couldn’t see.

“There are more of you guys?” Jack asked in brief, dumb amazement. “Please don’t tell me you’re as weird as the other one.”

Just like Io, this one ignored Jack’s question, but, unlike Io, it didn’t seem to be averse to physical contact, and snuggled into Jack’s knees.

“You’re not gonna find much warmth there,” Jack mentioned softly. He heard the sound of a car engine start up, and by the time he’d turned around the masked humans and their body had driven off.

Only after the crescent had grown quiet again did he hear a muffled, tiny sound come from inside the house the humans had just left. It took Jack a whole second to recognise the sound for what it was, and in the next his adrenaline had him on his feet. He was at the door in an instant, freezing and shattering the lock with his staff and kicking the damn thing down.

The house itself was tiny and a complete mess. It was nothing more than a single room, with two beds against either wall and a kitchen in the back corner. But beneath a broken countertop, nestled in a cupboard that’s door was lying in splinters on the floor, sat a little girl hugging her knees and sobbing.

Jack’s heart squeezed so painfully it wasn’t funny, and he instinctively rushed over broken plates and stains he didn’t even want to contemplate to get to her. He knelt down on the floor in front of the little bundle of blue, kicking away the splintered furniture so neither of them would get cut on anything.

“Hey,” he said softly. The little girl looked up, two glassy, black eyes landing on Jack. _Definitely not human_ , he thought as he took stock of whatever parts of her he could see, from her thin arms to the navy blue hair matted around her like a blanket. “Are you hurt?”

She shook her tearstained head, and Jack sighed in relief. “Do you wanna come with me? It isn’t very nice here.”

The girl said nothing, but reached out a single small hand to Jack’s own extended one. She was willing.

Willing for all of five seconds before she touched his skin and pulled back with a jolt. The girl tucked herself back in tight again and began to shiver.

Jack wanted to curse. Wanted to curse so badly he almost had the f-bomb slipping and destroying any rep he might have with any child ever.

She wouldn’t come with him because he was too cold. He could understand that, on some level. But it still hurt.

But, importantly, how was he going to get her to leave this place otherwise?

Keeping one eye on her, he backed up and headed for the door. The new little spirit was sitting next to the girl on the floor, looking about on the verge of crying along with her, and Jack wasn’t sure whether he should be grateful that the spirit seemed so invested in their new charge or distraught over the fact that he was gonna have to help two crying children in a moment.

He ducked his head out the doorway, conjuring some half-cocked plan in his mind that involved sending an ice-made messenger to North and requesting a yeti or hot water bottle be spared from frantic pre-Christmas duty (because Jack figured that North had probably found some voodoo enchantment to make even the inanimate members of the workshop pull their weight).

But before he could even figure out what kind of thing could get to North with a semblance of haste, Jack slammed into a hard chest and went sprawling on his ass on a (mercifully) clean patch of snow.

“Uh, my –” he looked up and his heart stopped dead in his chest at the sight of the annoyed frown glaring down at him. “Pitch?” he breathed.

The Nightmare King’s expression darkened. “We need to talk.”

Jack’s apprehension jabbed at him, reminding him of why he was out in this rotten grove in the first place. Shaking off his surprise, he steeled himself for another unhappy confrontation. “How did you find me?”

Pitch stared Jack down for a moment before he turned his frown onto the off-colour snow to the right of Jack. “Inari can make the Emporium appear wherever she wants.”

_How fucking vague_.

Jack’s eyes narrowed. Although he’d been obsessing like a bitch for hours over the fact that Pitch had never followed him out of Kitrashin like a properly repentant human being, now that the frost spirit had the guy in front of him, he was feeling nearly everything _but_ the inkling to play nice and make up. Pitch had taken hours too long to come and try to pretend like he gave a shit about Jack’s feelings.

So Jack decided that he had every right to be as crabby as he wanted to be.

Swap up their dynamics, for once.

The frost spirit got to his feet and cleaned snow off his ass as he said, “I’m busy at the moment so whatever it is that you want to talk about can take a hike until I’m done.”

Pitch’s expression was as steady as it was flat when it retuned to Jack. “And what is it exactly that you’re doing in a place like this?”

Was that… _suspicion_ he could hear in Pitch’s tone? Like Jack was wandering around out here, what, _looting_ or something? He was getting the _third degree_ from _Pitch Black_ , of all people?! If Jack was any less of a man, he would have spat on Pitch’s boots for whatever insult the Nightmare King was trying to imply with his not-so-subtle question. “None of your damn business,” the frost spirit growled.

Pitch twisted, probably to reach out and grab him, but before his fist could make contact with any part of Jack’s clothing or anatomy, another small, broken sob came from inside the house, and shock had the Nightmare King freezing.

Concerned, Jack peeked his head around the doorframe and saw that the little girl was still tucked up in the kitchen. The small spirit, though, was nowhere in sight.

“Who is she?”

Jack didn’t have to turn around to know that the man was standing behind him in the doorway, close enough that Jack could feel his warmth scattering across the frigid air of the grove.

He inched away from the warmth until his back was against the exterior of the doorframe. “I don’t know,” he said to the stained snow behind Pitch. “But she’s alone and I’m going to help her.” He finally looked over at Pitch then, at the unreadable but – for whatever reason – no longer hostile look on his face. “So tell me what you want already and leave.”

Pitch looked irked at Jack’s persistent attitude, and he opened his mouth to snap at him – Jack could _feel_ it coming – but after a few seconds he closed it. Considered something while staring at Jack hatefully. Then said, “It can wait.”

Jack rolled his eyes. “How thoughtful of you.”

“ _Jack_.”

Jack’s lip curled at the sound of his name being used informally again, and he felt like biting back at the man.

_Finally, some sensible responses to his presence. I know some deliciously harmful trivia, all you need to do is –_

Jack smacked his head back into the weathered wood behind him, sending a lance of pain through his skull and shutting up his thoughts for a second. He took a deep, clarifying breath, and recognised that if his thoughts wanted him to keep fighting with Pitch, then it was probably a bad idea.

He also didn’t want to waste any more time out here in the snow with the guy. Without meeting Pitch’s eyes, Jack nodded toward the door. “I don’t want to leave her in this place.”

The Nightmare King didn’t move for a moment, and Jack felt his eyes linger on him a little longer than they should have. But although Jack wasn’t about to start another war, he wasn’t in the mood for dealing with Pitch’s despicably well-arranged face either. It didn’t take long for the man to probably figure as much, and he step over the threshold of the house and entered the ruined home.

“But I’m too cold to touch her,” he added quietly once Pitch was inside.

Pitch said nothing for a few minutes, and as he watched flakes of deceptively pretty snow cascade from the sky, Jack assumed by the lack of an aghast outburst that the little spirit had yet to return from its vanishing act. He also began to think that maybe Pitch might have pulled something similar until his low voice uttered, “She’s distraught, so it would be best if I didn’t either.”

Jack whirled on the man in surprise. “You want to help?”

Standing in the middle of the wreckage, Pitch was already staring straight at him, as if waiting for Jack to finally turn and look at him. The frost spirit swallowed and Pitch tilted his head back a little, his eyes a stale mix of grey and gold.

“Just accept the aid without questioning it.”

Jack bit the inside of his cheek. Was this…was this some sort of peace offering?

_Remember the last time you got your hopes up like that?_

“You didn’t stay quiet for long, did you?” Jack muttered. Even though he hated to admit it, his thoughts had a point. His abdomen throbbed again, and a nauseous quality to the pain had Jack leaning against the doorframe for support.

But regardless of whether Pitch was doing this out of the kindness of his own remorse or for some other convoluted reason, it was still help that Jack couldn’t afford to dismiss. Especially since the probability of any of his icy creations actually making it to North’s was minimal at best. “Do you still have enough juice left to teleport to Yves’s?”

He felt a touch of guilt for asking, especially remembering the way Pitch had been clutching at his chest when they’d been fighting the Nightmares. The man grimaced, but nodded anyway. “Barely.”

He was willing to go this far to help? Jack took another long breath to try and settle his upturned stomach. “Can you… can you get Phoenix to come here? He’s the only one –”

But Pitch was already turning away from him before he could finish his request. “I’ll fetch him.”

“Will you be –”

“Yes,” Pitch said in a tone that offered no more room for concern.

Muttering something unpleasant under his breath, Pitch glanced around the tiny house once more before he spotted a place beneath a toppled bookshelf that seemed to be crawling with shadows.

Without looking at Jack, he wandered over to the bookshelf with his head high and his pride at maximum output. Even the little girl stopped her sobbing long enough to just stare at him stalk across the room.

Then Pitch proceeded to fold himself under the bookcase and disappear.

Jack snorted once he was sure Pitch was gone. He was the Boogeyman, for Christ’s sake. Why was he so determined to go out in style when everyone knew he crawled under beds as a hobby?

He thought of Bunny for an amused moment, all that warrior pride for an artist of _eggs_ , and chuckled as he went to keep the little girl company.

 

Considering what degree of hell Pitch undoubtedly had to go through to convince Phoenix to be cooperative, the duo showed up on the house’s doorstep quicker than Jack had expected them to.

But, really, Jack would have been happier if they’d arrived instantaneously, because at least then he wouldn’t have to spend any longer in this damn house. As he’d been trying to cheer the quivering girl up with whatever ice magic he could think of (the new spirit off somewhere, no doubt to return when Jack would be made to regret it the most), he’d begun to get a picture of what must have happened in the house before he’d arrived, with the blood, glass, water and broken furniture thrown around the place.

And despite his grievances, he was seriously thankful that Pitch had shown up when he did.

A darkly clad leg booted Phoenix into the house, and the fire spirit turned back to Pitch in a rage, throwing a skull (Skørj, Jack recognised) at the Nightmare King’s smirking face before the fire spirit spun on his heel and levelled Jack with a hot glare.

“Frost, what the actual fuck,” Phoenix exploded as Jack mentally commended Pitch on the asshole’s ruthless efficiency when it counted. “You know I’ve been helping Skreek all day – Oh Jesus.”

Phoenix’s face was picture perfect when he realised that they had company, and Jack would have laughed his ass off if this place didn’t give him the creeps the longer he stayed here.

He stood from where he’d been kneeling near the girl and wandered over to the door. Gently, because he wanted Phoenix’s help and not his anger, Jack said, “I know you’re busy, but she’s cold and she won’t come near me.”

The fire spirit looked between Jack and the girl still huddled in the kitchen. “Why are you trying to lure a little girl out of her home anyway?”

“I don’t think this is her home.” With his staff, he flicked a shard of glass on the floor into Phoenix’s boot and in a lower tone said, “I was walking past and these humans were dragging a body out the door and through the snow. I don’t think they could see her, thankfully. But even if this was her home, there’s nothing here now.”

The girl’s hair and eyes alone indicated that she wasn’t anything human, but if someone with some special sort of sight had found her, perhaps they could have been living here as a family. The thought made Jack’s throat prickle with sadness

Phoenix looked visibly repulsed at the news. “No wonder it stinks in here,” he muttered, and when he caught sight of the imploring face Jack was making at him, Phoenix groaned. “You know how much I fucking hate shadows, Frost. The next time you want my help, send anyone but _him_.”

Jack flickered a look toward Pitch before dropping his voice into a muttered whisper. “I didn’t have much of a choice, Phoenix. And you brought Skørj, didn’t you? Why didn’t you use it on the way back here?”

In an equally low tone, Phoenix uttered, “Bastard probably didn’t want to look bad in front of Yves.”

Jack drew back at the sound of that, and sent a pointed glare over to prideful idiot loitering in the doorway.

Meanwhile, Phoenix made a grand display of rolling up the sleeves of his flannel shirt and elbowing Jack out of his way. “Alright, back up. Let the master do his work.”

Jack felt a small grin lift the corner of his mouth as he watched Phoenix approach the girl. Despite his abrasive personality, Phoenix was surprisingly good with children, a clear indicator of how warm his heart really was beneath all that cursing. Jack would never in his life admit it, but it was one of the main traits he liked about the guy. One of the few, really, but one nonetheless.

The girl looked up when Phoenix knelt before her, but before the spirit started to work his charm, he looked over his shoulder and nodded toward the doorway. “And I brought Skørj with me in the first place ‘cause the ride you sent is starting to look a little green.”

Grin fading, Jack’s eyes snapped to Pitch, and his brow furrowed when he noticed how pale Pitch’s complexion had become. The Nightmare King had even taken Jack’s place leaning against the doorway for some semblance of support. The frost spirit felt guilt gnaw at his insides despite the fact that he was still supposed to be mad.

Pitch looked grumpy that the fact of his waning health had been pointed out, but also too tired to put up much of a fight. He tossed Skørj at Jack, who caught the ancient skull with one hand.

“At least we have Skørj to bail us out this time,” Jack muttered as he ran his thumb over one of the skull’s fangs.

“I will admit it’s convenient,” Pitch murmured, barely loud enough for Jack to hear him. “I don’t think I would have been able to get three people and myself through Yves’s wards even if I was not feeling like this.”

Jack tensed a little at the sound of the confession. “About that…”

Pitch frowned at him. “What?”

Jack grimaced. “You’re not gonna like this, but I found another one.”

As if summoned by the mere mention of the thing, the tiny spirit shook off a couple of books it had buried itself under and scrambled over to Jack.

Pitch looked absolutely devastated. “There’s _more_?”

But before Jack’s newest stalker could spark another argument, Phoenix was already walking up to them with the girl bundled in his arms. Her face was pressed against his neck, hair matted in her lap as she snuggled against Phoenix’s hot skin. “Wipe those expressions off your faces and get Skørj ready. And I ain’t gonna be the one to break this to Yves.”

Relieved that Phoenix had managed to also get her to stop crying, Jack held the skull out between them all. Pitch pushed off the doorway and came to stand by his shoulder, still managing to loom over them all despite the nearly imperceptible swaying that was happening as he stood. Jack tore his eyes away from the Nightmare King when he felt the little spirit step onto his toes like it was making super sure he wasn’t going to leave it behind.

He sighed. “I’ll handle it. Skørj, take us home.”

 

Yves was mad at him.

Jack had expected the baker’s wrath, he really had, but to be sitting across the kitchen table in the direct line of fire was something else entirely. The man was terrifying when he was angry, his eyes began to glow and Jack could see the outline of the path his cheeks usually split before Halloween.

He was growling at Jack about dragging even more people into his realm – not just the little girl, but the spirit as well, which was currently trembling between Jack’s legs beneath the table as if _it_ was the one getting scolded – and how he should at least _ask_ before inviting over every stray spirit he came across.

Jack squirmed a little in his seat but otherwise took the lecture without complaints. He knew he’d messed up by overestimating Yves’s hospitality (the man was an excellent host, but was _not_ very receptive to uninvited guests) and, in all honestly, Yves had every right to be fuming at Jack.

Because the second they’d warped into the realm, the little girl in Phoenix’s arms had opened her mouth and started _screaming_.

The sound had been bloodcurdling and deafening and everybody in the vicinity had dropped to the ground in agony. Phoenix had nearly let go of the girl, in shock and pain, but somehow managed to heroically hang onto her long enough for Yves to stumble down the porch steps and clamp two oven mitts over the girl’s ears.

Her shrieking had died down, the wolves who had begun to howl across the other side of the realm grew quiet, and everyone realised that the tiny thing Jack had found was actually a banshee.

In the kitchen, Jack rubbed his foot against the side of the little spirit, tickling it as Yves continued yelling. Faintly, from the attic above, he could hear the sound of Yves’s player piano belting out a tune loud enough to block out whatever sounds had made the banshee react so violently upon entering the realm. Phoenix had initially balked at the idea of leaving the little girl in the attic, but nobody, not even the hero, wanted their eardrums busted and the longer the girl stayed outside the more upset she seemed to get.

And so since oven mitts weren’t going to soothe her indefinitely, Yves, grumbling unhappily, had smacked his old piano into life and Phoenix and Jack had hauled one of the nicer chaise lounges into the attic space to give her something to sleep on.

Now soft music filtered down from the roof of the house as the banshee slept off the ordeal she’d experienced that day, and despite earning a probably permanent spot on Yves’s To Murder list, Jack couldn’t find it in himself to regret his decision to bring her here.

“– more _children_ –”

“Yves,” Jack cut in. Yves’s shoulders slumped, the anger finally falling from his face as Jack gave him a sincerely apologetic look. “I’m sorry for bringing spirits into your home without your permission. I _am_. I was originally going to try and get North to help me with her but Pitch rocked up and –” Jack licked his lips. “I’m sorry.”

Yves looked up at him through dark lashes like he was a lost cause. “Your heart is too big, bony Jack. Much too big. And you expect the rest of us to have the same –”

“Don’t assume I expect anything like that from you. I know you’re iffy around kids, but until we can figure out a way to keep her calm she can’t leave the attic so she won’t bother you.”

“I am not _bothered_ by her, I just –” Yves sighed, rubbed his face. “There are too many people in my realm.”

Jack leaned across the bench and tried a smile on the man. “Come on. It can’t be all bad. We’re better company than those pumpkin people you have living outside.”

Yves poked a finger into Jack’s forehead, and the frost spirit retreated, rubbing the spot with a pout. “That is debatable. I am going to clean now, so unless you want to be polished from head to toe, I recommend you go and find another one of your occupant buddies.”

Jack jumped off the stool, and the little spirit hopped up with him. “Haven’t you been cleaning all day?”

“I need to clean _more_.”

The glowing began to re-enter Yves’s eyes, and, with a small laugh, Jack ran for it while he could.


	14. A Gift of Bravery

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> While the wolves are settling in, Jack gets given two gifts: some intel and some courage, and he builds a bridge with both of them.

True to his word, Skreek managed to teleport his entire army from the fortress to Yves’s barracks in the span of a single day. The feat wouldn’t have been half as difficult if so many of the wolves were still mobile or otherwise conscious, and Jack knew first hand that Skreek had many foul tricks up his buttoned sleeves when it came to advanced warfare and Yves’s teleportation skulls.

But the day’s mission was not in the name of battle or glory, and although the wolves worked swiftly to round up their wounded family and get them to safety, they had to treat every bedridden brother or sister with the utmost tenderness. This, none found difficult to do, and when Jack was summoned to help move boxes and furniture to make way for beds, he found himself caught by the affection the wolves showed one another.

These soldiers were an army, one of the most fearsome in the world.

But they were also a family.

And Jack could only imagine the atrocities they would do to whatever was responsible for all their pain.

Jack ducked out of one of the cottages that made up the incredibly impressive settlement that was Yves’s barracks. It was like the owner of the realm had an entire little town packed away here behind the trees, with cobbled streets lined with simple homes constructed of dark stone and wood.

Beyond the cottages were sand-covered training grounds, empty stables and a watch tower, god knows why, in the centre of it all.

It was as if this realm had been home to an army once. One even larger than the Werewolfian Horde, considering how many spare cottages were left when the last of the wolves had been teleported in.

Tracing frost over a stained window, Jack wondered what might have happened to whoever had once lived here.

Interrupting his daydream, a dark figure emerged a few houses down from Jack, and the frost spirit’s fingers ceased the art they were creating on the glass.

Golden eyes swung to Jack, and he had no idea of what sort of expression he was meant to be showing Pitch. They were fighting, he knew that much. But the idiot king had also offered to help him ( _again_ , why did he keep _doing that_ ). So were they meant to be nice to each other again?

A second later, Jack nearly laughed. They had never been nice to each other, not really.

Tanton stepped out of the house behind Pitch, and the Nightmare King’s eyes left Jack to frown down at the wolf. Tanton was explaining something with his hands, making scooping motions and wiggling his fingers, and Jack found amusement curling his lips into a light smirk as the pair headed his way.

The werewolf, who was leading the way, noticed Jack’s smirk during his explanation and took a moment to sneer at the spirit. “Get back to work, punk,” he said, ruffling Jack’s hair as he passed by.

Jack tried to flatten his poor ruined hair as he glared at the retreating wolf, but then a shadow was moving by him and Jack’s heart gave a painful thump.

“Do you feel better?” he blurted.

Pitch looked down at him in surprise, gold swirling around a pit of black, and after a cautious moment nodded. “I am regrettably healthy enough to be dragged around by Tanton.”

On the verge of heading into the house one down from Jack, Tanton reared back from the threshold and jabbed at finger toward Pitch. “Bitch, don’t act like you don’t love this detective stuff.”

Pitch gave a long suffering sigh, and Jack couldn’t help but grin just a little. “Guess you shouldn’t keep Watson waiting, then.”

The Nightmare King raised an invisible eyebrow at him in confusion, but it really didn’t matter since Tanton got the reference anyway. And despite the fact that Jack had murmured the comment, the werewolf and his enhanced hearing was stomping back over to the spirit. He slung an arm around Jack’s neck, not tight enough to cause any damage, but enough that the tender spots on Jack’s throat throbbed a little.

He barely held back his wince as Tanton growled at the side of his face. “Jack, you piece of sparkling snow, if anything _I_ am the brains of this operation.”

Jack elbowed him in the gut to get him off and grinned at the wolf. “Is that what Pitch is letting you think?”

Tanton just rolled his eyes and headed back toward his intended destination. “You’re lucky I like you, Jack.”

The frost spirit scoffed. He turned back to Pitch, ready to explain the Sherlock Holmes reference if he needed to, but by the look on Pitch’s face their conversation was already over. The Nightmare King was glaring off at Tanton with enough focus that Jack felt literally invisible even though he stood right next to the man, and the pang that realisation gave him hurt a little too much.

So he said nothing as Pitch offered him barely a glance before he glided past Jack and after his detective partner. He said nothing even though he felt like grabbing the man and hitting him, pinning him to the uneven ground and doing _something_.

A wolf whistle cut through Jack’s moping, and the frost spirit’s head swung around to see Skreek sitting across the cobbled street on a windowsill. To Jack’s bleak surprise the newest little spirit was sitting on the ground between Skreek’s legs, and Jack smiled a little as he crossed the street and joined them.

He parked himself on the sill next to Skreek and the little spirit hopped up and tucked itself happily between Jack’s calves.

“What was that little standoff I just saw there?” the werewolf asked with squirming eyebrows.

Jack settled his head back against the window as his fingers traced over the top of the spirit’s head. “You’re making Pitch do more work for you,” he said, deciding that he couldn’t be bothered answering Skreek’s question.

The werewolf’s eyebrows stopped moving just long enough for one to hitch. But instead of pursuing Jack like he usually did, Skreek surprisingly let the matter drop – he’d probably heard everything anyway, so Jack didn’t even know why he was prying.

Skreek let his brows rest and shrugged his broad shoulders. “If he agrees to it. But getting a guy like him to answer that crow was a miracle and a half, let alone demanding more of his time.” He grinned down at Jack. “I still have my hopes riding on you convincing him to stick around.”

Ha. Like he’d be of any use in that department with the way things were disintegrating between them. “What do you mean a guy like him?”

Skreek waved a vague hand around in front of him and managed to startle a _mip_ out of the little spirit hiding in Jack’s legs. “A villain who’s been forced to work with other villains.”

Jack’s eyes narrowed at that. “What difference would that make?” he asked, barely able to keep his defensiveness from affecting his voice. After all, he’d worked with his own fair share of slime bags in his life. Was Skreek insinuating that Jack was as much of a dick as Pitch? That Yves and his own self were as well? “You’ve –”

“I’ve never experienced alliances like Pitch has,” Skreek said, and Jack swallowed down his objections. There was something akin to pity in the werewolf's tone, and a sharpened look in his eyes that made Jack think Skreek knew exactly what he’d been getting upset over and how irrelevant it was. “And those agreements are sketchy at best, murderous at worst. I’m lucky I have such a loyal pack. Honestly I don’t think I’d have the brains to outsmart other criminal masterminds before they stabbed me in the back.”

Jack’s stomach rolled and he pressed a hand against it to keep his organs in place. He’d once considered Pitch’s alliances to be something reflecting some sort of accorded friendship, but recalling the harsh way Pitch had reacted to the sympathy Jack had given him on Halloween, he had to wince a little at his own ignorance.

Maybe both of them were doing a shit job of trying to understand one another.

Jack licked his lips as his mind tried to align Skreek’s words with Pitch’s ever so shifty behaviour. “So you’re saying he has…trust issues?”

Skreek looked at him in surprise. “You hadn’t noticed? And to think you’ve been besotted with him all this time.”

Jack glared at that. “I haven’t been _besotted_.”

Skreek waved Jack off with an expression that proclaimed exactly how uninterested he was in Jack’s objection. “Regardless, I’m saying that if we don’t give him a reason to hang around, he’ll up and leave and I’ll lose the bloke with the most insight into the minds of my wolves.”

Jack bit the inside of his cheek and chewed as he thought. “You say I’m your hope, Skreek, but I don’t know how to convince him to stay if he doesn’t want to.” He barely knew how to have a conversation with the man without offending him in some minor – or not-so-minor – way. “We don’t even get along.”

“Are you saying you want him to head off then?”

Jack looked at the wolf. “Why are you asking me that?”

The werewolf just smiled. “I’m not letting you dodge this one, Jack.”

Shaking his head, Jack looked out at the cottages they were surrounded by. There was still a steady flow of wolves rustling about, interrupted only by the occasional sighting of Phoenix, but everyone was winding down. The sky was beginning to turn with the oncoming of dusk, and the only real energy that seemed to remain in the barracks was in the form of Tanton drawing some half-baked diagram on a window and trying to explain it to Pitch.

Jack watched the Nightmare King scowl at the werewolf’s drawing. He eventually muttered something to the wolf, and Tanton nodded so enthusiastically Jack thought his head might snap off. To Skreek, Jack murmured, “Will you call me a liar if I say I don’t know?”

“Yes.”

A low laugh escaped Jack’s throat, and he turned a fond smile onto the wolf. Skreek was looking at Jack with much the same expression, before he turned his eyes over to his third captain and the king who was looking somewhat less harassed than he had been three seconds ago. “We have to give him some incentive to stay.”

The frost spirit didn’t like the sound of that. “Like what?” he asked cautiously.

But Jack’s caution wasn’t enough to save him from Skreek’s evil mind. The werewolf shrugged again, oh so casually, and said in a nonchalant tone, “Maybe, I don’t know, whatever you’ve been fantasizing about doing to him since the day you met him.”

Jack tensed at Skreek’s idea, and the look he gave Skreek was a thousand degrees below friendly. The little spirit between Jack’s legs _mip_ ed in distress, and Jack quickly moved his limbs away from the thing in case his skin had dropped in temperature.

The spirit looked unharmed, though, which was a relief. Jack pointed his glare back at Skreek and the werewolf laughed heartily, completely (irritatingly) unaffected. “Are you going to try and deny it, scrawny Jack? Because I remember when we asked Havið to show us who your cold ass was pining after, and there Pitch was, all gloomy looking.”

Frustratingly, Jack could feel a cold flush rising in his cheeks. Although Havið was one of Yves’s most useful skulls – it had the ability to look through the world and spy on anyone or anything – Jack was starting to hate the thing more than any of the others.

Except Yvorik _._ He could never hate Havið _that_ much.

He peered across the path to make sure Pitch was still occupied and didn’t hear Skreek divulge one of Jack’s more embarrassing secrets to the wider community.

In a low hiss, Jack told the damn werewolf, “That was a long time ago, Skreek. I’ve fought a war against him since then. I’d be stupid to maintain a crush on a guy who thinks I’m a piece of trash that helped ruin his life.”

But Skreek was just smiling at him still, all teeth and no mercy, like he could see straight through Jack but was too much of a gentleman to come right out and say, _I guess that makes you a big ball of stupid, then_.

Jack grumbled an insult under his breath and dragged one of his legs up to his chest. “People change, Skreek.”

“People do, oh young sprinkling snow. But we don’t.” Jack raised an eyebrow at the stupid nickname, but Skreek was ignoring him as he gazed out at the barracks wistfully. “The look on Phoenix’s face that night was priceless. I should have gotten a photo of it to blow up and hang over Yves’s mantle.” Skreek’s eyes slid to Jack’s, and the frost spirit stilled. “It’s the same one he wears around Pitch even now, despite existing in the safest conditions imaginable.”

_I used to be “people”_ , Jack felt like saying, _so don’t compare my feelings to Phoenix’s fear_.

But he wasn’t “people” anymore, was he? He hadn’t been for three hundred years and…maybe Skreek was right. Maybe stale souls remained stale.

A concerned _mip_ came from his knee, and Jack and Skreek both looked down at the little spirit, who was now hopping on its four legs as if it wanted Jack to pick it up.

Setting his staff against the window, Jack dropped his leg back onto the ground and hefted the creature onto his lap, where it snuggled its face into Jack’s chest cheerfully in spite of how cold be must've been.

“Say, hypothetically, you might be onto something,” Jack grumbled. Skreek grinned widely at him, but Jack levelled him with a look so he wouldn’t get excited. “If you’re suggesting what I think you are, even if it was for the wolves…” He recalled having the same idea in Kitrashin earlier that day, and his lip curled as he remembered the sadness that had blistered into his skin. “I _can’t_ do anything like that, Skreek. And what makes you think it’d even work anyway? He’s such a bastard he’d mock me for it and walk right on out of here only to haunt me with erotic nightmares for the rest of my miserable life.”

It’d be a disaster and Jack would die on the spot, only for Yves to resurrect his ghost so he could scrub his leftover remorse and humiliation out of the carpet he’d melted into.

But the werewolf looked nowhere near as concerned about the scenario Jack was contemplating as he should have been. “I don’t know, Jack. You’ve got a pretty face, everyone thinks so. Definitely on the scraggly side, but some no-gooders might be into that.”

Jack snorted at whatever that comment was meant to be, torn between wanting to blush and outright bitchslap Skreek. But regardless of whether he had the goods (as Skreek so reckoned), Jack was less than prepared to offer _himself_ up as incentive. And especially not to Pitch… just _not_ _Pitch_. “I don’t…” Skreek looked at him, and Jack swallowed. “I don’t want him to think the only thing I’m good for is sex.”

Skreek sighed and a huge elbow jabbed Jack in his arm. “I didn’t say you had to _sleep_ with him. Just stop beating around the bush and be direct with the man. Yelling at him in metaphors will only get you so far.”

Jack’s head snapped up, and the werewolf grinned mischievously. “Werewolf hearing,” he said, tapping an ear.

The frost spirit flushed a little, but refused to be moved by Skreek’s oh so brilliant plan. “If he’s not interested in fucking me, I doubt throwing whatever feelings you think I have into the mix will help.”

The werewolf overlord pouted, actually _pouted_ , like he was some petulant two-year-old and Jack could barely believe the facial expressions this guy was capable of. “Where is my fearless Jack hiding in there? Stop being so dramatic and give it a go. You said you weren’t getting on anymore, so what do you have to lose?”

Saying it like that was all well and good, but… “And if all this ‘being direct’ just drives him away completely?” Jack mumbled, feeling a little ill.

The werewolf shrugged. “Then I’ll rent myself a psychic, and we’ll feed you cake while Phoenix gives you a strip tease that’ll be so stimulating it’ll leave you in a coma for a month.”

Jack laughed, the little spirit bouncing on his chest as he giggled at the mental image of what Skreek was promising.

These guys were ridiculous…but they could be so stupidly kind, couldn’t they? His laughter faded as he thought over what Skreek was suggesting. It could only end badly – anything involving Pitch and feelings was only going to end badly – but if he prepared himself for the worst, at least he wouldn’t end up as some broken hearted frost spirit crying into cake he couldn’t eat.

Jack sighed and hugged the spirit closer to his chest. “This is going to hurt, isn’t it?” he whispered into the top of its head.

“Might not,” Skreek said cheerfully.

Jack sent him a daggered look and decided that a change of topic was more than overdue. “Why are you sitting over here anyway? Letting your goons do all the work?”

Skreek snorted a laugh. “Gotta rest the leg every now and then. It’s a great accessory, but gets heavy to lug around after a while.”

Jack gave the mentioned limb a concerned look as the spirit wiggled in his hold. “Did you ever find the faerie that did it?”

The wolf’s face darkened slightly. “Not yet.”

So Skreek wasn’t as blasé about the whole thing as he pretended to be. Jack smirked a little at the werewolf’s dangerous expression, and said quietly, “I’m sorry I wasn’t around when it happened. But if you need help, I’m willing.”

“With hobbling up stairs or gutting the bastard who cut me?”

Jack grimaced at both options, but mainly the first. “You’re too heavy, you’d probably crush me if I tried to be a crutch.” When he didn’t add any more to his response, a touched, teary-eyed expression suddenly washed over Skreek’s face. Jack jumped back a little and quickly added, “I’m not prepared to kill anyone, though. But I’ll help fight if you need.”

“Indirect murder is still murder,” Skreek pointed out, eyebrows waggling once again.

Jack shrugged a little but said nothing. Skreek chuckled and ruffled Jack’s hair with a level of affection that had the spirit’s throat closing. “I appreciate it, Jack.”

_I don’t_ , his thoughts grumbled.

Jack ducked away from his hand quickly, and cursed at his own head as Skreek seemed to admire the creature nestled in Jack’s lap. “This one seems to be cuddlier than the other,” he commented.

Jack grinned in agreement. “Less weird, too. Thankfully.” He considered the white package in his arms for a few minutes. “Do you have a name as well?” he asked it.

The little thing nodded without extracting itself from Jack’s hoodie.

Skreek nudged Jack’s foot with his leg. “Speak of the devil.”

Jack nearly had a heart attack at the thought of having to deal with Pitch this soon (he definitely wasn’t ready for whatever confrontation they were working their way up to), but then he looked up and saw Io grinning at the frost spirit and the quivering creature in his lap. The taller spirit stepped right between Jack’s legs and hastily head-butted the smaller spirit in the back to get its attention.

An alarmed _mip_ later, the smaller spirit was turning and staring tearfully at Io.

“Play nice, you two,” Skreek warned them.

Io ignored him, but the spirit in Jack’s lap wiggled until he set it down on the ground beside Io. The two stared at each other for a few moments, before Io suddenly turned on its heels and ran off into the trees. The little spirit hurried after it, crying out in its tiny voice as it tried to catch up.

Jack’s fingers flexed on empty air, unsure how he’d been dumped so easily when the spirit had been clinging to him so adamantly. “Guess I’ll ask for a name later,” he mumbled.

“Or you can just get Art Degree Phoenix to make up something abstract for it,” Skreek suggested.

Jack snickered, and when they heard the fire spirit hurl an indignant insult at the two of them from somewhere in a nearby cottage, Skreek and Jack burst into laughter.

 

Everyone was officially permitted back into the house when the dusk sky had transformed into a deep magenta, at which point Yves had obliterated any speck of uncleanliness that may or may not have existed within his domain. Jack honestly had no idea why dust even bothered to try and collect in the house. Between the fireplace eating it as potential food for its sprites, the pumpkin plant displacing it constantly with its moving branches, and the samurai quality of Yves’s cleaning techniques, _Jack_ was terrified to live in the house, let alone defenceless particles of fluff.

In the dining room, Tanton had forced Skreek, Yves, Pitch, and Yanov to gather around the large ebony table so he could explain whatever ingenious plan he’d thought up with Pitch that afternoon. Phoenix, although uninvited to the party, was interjecting a little too often with questions and Tanton was glaring at him as he gritted out answers like he was about ready to throw the spirit through a window.

Jack snorted as he left the arguing mob downstairs. He hadn’t been invited to Tanton’s little conference either, but unlike Phoenix, he was also uninterested in whatever they were concocting. If they needed Jack’s input they’d ask for it, but short of needing an expert on ice, he wouldn’t be much use.

Upstairs, where the low notes of a lullaby were floating on down from the attic above, Jack snuck into an empty bedroom and threw his staff onto the meticulously made bed. He and Phoenix had checked on the banshee before Tanton had begun his seminar, and both of them had been relieved to see the girl fast asleep with the piano blotting out any potential silence with a haunting lullaby like the one it was playing now.

“Another amazing host under Yves’s roof,” Jack murmured, sending a brief smile to the ceiling.

Then his smile fell and he turned toward the wardrobe sitting in the corner of the room.

Or, more accurately, the mirror that hung on its ornate doors.

He stepped up to the reflective surface, aiming to suss out the day’s wounds, and immediately cringed when he saw the state of his hair. “Goddamn wolves,” he muttered as he tried to flatten the back down without much success.

Then a darkening streak across his throat caught his eye, and Jack promptly forgot about his hair in favour of tipping his head back and wincing at the discoloured marks that were definitely going to bruise by tomorrow. He ran a finger down the darkest mark, one that was mottling its way to the surface of his skin near the base of his throat, and pain prickled through the blooming bruise.

“Asshole,” he muttered, and pressed his fingers in just a little harder. When pain stabbed into his windpipe, his traitor of a dick twitched in curiosity, remembering how close it had come to getting attention in Kitrashin. Jack glared down at it as he pulled his fingers away.

Luckily, though, whatever kink Jack might be developing from his close and not-so-nice encounters with Pitch was forgotten the second he reached for the hem of his hoodie.

He tentatively lifted the bottom of his hoodie and shirt, and grimaced at the sight the mirror presented him with.

Between the scars that ruined the skin either side of his stomach from his ribs down to his hipbones, blotchy black bruises that looked a little too dark to be entirely normal had surfaced. Jack squinted and moved a little closer to the mirror. He prodded a finger into one of the splodges, and gasped as fear and pain tore suddenly through his entire abdomen.

He cursed loudly, and grabbed hold of the wardrobe’s handle to brace himself as paranoia scraped down his back like torn fingernails.

_To use fear as a weapon like this is loathsome._

The handle creaked in Jack’s grip. “And how is all the crap you’re always pulling any better? You don’t get the right to judge someone’s weapons when your battle plan is to try to make me break down by insulting everything I do.”

_Not everything. Just the idiotic decisions._

Jack laughed humourlessly. “Like everything concerning Pitch?”

_If you had an actual mind in that useless head of yours, you’d see that I’m doing you a favour. I’m trying to_ help _you –_

“I don’t need your help! Or your opinions. Or your _anything_.”

_But you do, Jack. If you’d just_ listened _to me the first time this happened then you wouldn’t have all this pain. You wouldn’t have to hide every time the dead come walking, wouldn’t look into the eyes of your fucked up little friend and see_ that _. You wouldn’t have your wretched fear, those hideous scars –_

“STOP!” he cried, trembling under the onslaught of images his brain was shoving at him. “Stop talking.”

_Not until you start paying attention._

Jack’s head fell forward into the mirror, and frost instantly began to reach out from where his skin touched the glass surface. The etchings in the wardrobe’s handle were biting into his hand, grinding against bone, and he could feel his breathing stutter and stumble.

He didn’t care whether his thoughts were right or not. He hated them, he hated the part of himself that could even produce them. His subconscious was probably a festering tar pit if that was the shit it spouted at the worst possible times.

“You ought not to be so ashamed of the scars,” a creaky voice told him softly. Jack startled at the sound, and it took him a second to recognise that it was the voice of the wardrobe (a wardrobe who’d once commented on the loveliness of his eyes, he remembered a moment later).

Jack closed his eyes tightly, his palm moving a little up his torso to drag his fingers along one of the rougher edges of the larger scar. “You shouldn’t say that so easily when you’re made of wood.”

But the wardrobe was not going to be bothered by Jack’s mood. “You are still beautiful,” it said in a final tone, and Jack’s nails dug into his skin. His eyes began to burn.

With disgustingly poor timing, there was a knock at the door. Jack dropped his clothes and spun, his heart thumping painfully at the sight of the Nightmare King standing in the doorway. The guy was watching Jack with an unreadable expression, one that made Jack’s panic flux despite the gentle sound of an unknown lullaby raining down through the ceiling.

He rubbed at his eyes with the sleeves of his hoodie and stormed over to get his staff. “What do you want?”

Pitch entered the room despite a clear lack of an invitation, and even worse, closed the door behind him. “Did you get hurt today?”

Without thinking, Jack snapped, “You mean besides by you?”

The Nightmare King stiffened, and looked away, a frown forming on his face. “I didn’t come here to fight with you.”

Jack froze. _Then what else did he come here for?_ It wasn’t to tell him that he was bailing on Tanton and leaving, was it? But…why would he bother letting Jack know if he was? Was he there just to gloat about it? Was he leaving to go back to his real job so he could stop having to deal with the shit Jack kept throwing at him?!

Oh god. He had to do something. For…for Skreek. For the wolves. Had to…stand in the doorway, yell at him, turn Pitch into an ice cube so he couldn’t move. What had Skreek told him to try?

A panicked, aborted noise escaped Jack’s throat before he could stop it. _Fuck. No._ He couldn’t do this yet. He couldn’t do this at all.

“Jack?”

The frost spirit grabbed at the front of the hoodie and demanded, in a voice that cracked, “Why are you here?”

He didn’t have any arguments to convince Pitch to stay. If the promise of Skreek’s favour wasn’t enough, then what was he meant to say? _Please_? As if Jack could ever offer him anything remotely –

“To apologise.”

Jack’s heart promptly forgot how to function. It floated dead in his chest, as stunned as its owner. He turned wide eyes to Pitch and whispered, “What?”

Pitch licked his lips, running his tongue over the bottom one. “I know what it is to be ignored.” His gaze slid into to Jack and he gestured at himself, at his whole invisible Nightmare King self, and Jack followed the sweep of Pitch’s hands with his eyes. “You know I do. I came here to say that if I made you feel like that it was not intentional. Not this time, at least.”

He…they… _what_? Pitch was _apologising_?

_Meaningless words_ , his mind whispered.

Jack forcibly shook the thought out of his head and recalled Skreek’s talk out in the barracks. If Pitch’s suspicious deflection of anything Jack had said to him had been unintentional, or so he claimed…

Jack looked up at Pitch, looked at a man who had potentially only ever associated with cheaters who’d always offered aid with the same hand they drew blood, and felt himself understand something about more about him. Something he might be very wrong about, but if he was right, it made a hell of a lot of sense.

_The bastard would have acted exactly the same toward them! All villains are liars, cheaters._

But that wasn’t because Pitch had a choice, was it? If it was kill or be killed, even amongst his own allies…wouldn’t Pitch have gotten used to it after a while? Wouldn’t he have come to expect it?

Jack nervously pulled at the strings wrapped around his thighs. Recently he’d had to extend the old ties since his pants had begun to properly fall apart, and he was just glad their frayed lengths gave him something to fiddle with while his stomach tried to eat itself out of tension.“Skreek told me that your alliances…weren’t nice to be a part of.”

Pitch looked startled by the sudden turn of the conversation, and his tone immediately shifted into something more guarded. “They weren’t.”

He wasn’t surprised by either change in Pitch’s demeanour, so Jack soldiered on, undeterred. “Is that why you keep picking everything I do to pieces?”

Jack’s thoughts buzzed in displeasure as Pitch’s brows hiked high in what seemed to be appalled indignation. The frost spirit curled his fingers tighter in the strings.

“Are you implying that I have – what, _trust issues_?” he spat, as if the very idea of such a flaw sickened him.

But the denial was exactly that – denial. Now that it had been pointed out to him, Jack could see Pitch’s brain turning, suspicion growing like a feral seed in his eyes. He watched it with a prickling sadness in the centre of his chest. “You pull apart everything I do and say and turn it on me with cruel words or a convoluted mind-fuck. You’re doing it right now. I can _see_ it.”

Pitch flinched, and he looked at Jack briefly before turning away altogether as if he knew Jack’s words were as literal as he’d intended them to be. Pitch ran his hand through his hair and made a frustrated sound.

Jack swallowed, and that raw feeling he’d felt last night scraped at him again, scratching like a dog begging to be let in. But considering the things it made Jack ask, he was beginning to see it more as a feral half-breed than some domesticated pup seeking shelter from the cold.

_Ahh look at you. You have all these enemies in your brain so you’re trying to seduce an outsider to make yourself feel better. You’re disgustingly weak._

Not even trying to deny the fact, in a voice no louder than a whisper, he murmured, “I just want to know why I’m not good enough for you to believe.”

He’d asked this question to the Moon a thousand times during the years before he’d made contact with any other spirits. Only in those pleas he’d searched for a reason why humanity, age after age, always left him behind. Had he been born with a flaw that the Moon only recognised after he’d given Jack a new name? Was it so _irredeemable_ that he was forever cursed to wander in non-existence to pay for it?

After a hundred years of waiting, he’d found an answer the hard way, and he hadn’t asked the Moon for anything again until it came looking for him in the form of North’s yetis and Bunny two centuries later.

_…Is that why you’re acting so pathetic in front of Pitch?_

Pitch had turned at the sound of Jack’s tone, and the Nightmare King was staring down at Jack with an honestly pained pinch in the middle of his forehead. His eyes fell to Jack’s chest and the man’s shoulders dropped, whether in pity or defeat, Jack couldn’t tell.

_You won’t find whatever you’re looking for in this guy._

But Jack wasn’t looking for the piece he was apparently missing. He’d gotten over that a long time ago, and buried the problem even deeper when the Guardians had opened their arms to him. He just wanted Pitch to be real with him, to see Jack and _tell_ him that he saw him. To let Jack know that the spirit could _fix_ whatever was wrong with himself –

His stomach twisted in nausea and pain, and he clutched at it helplessly.

Pitch’s pained expression rolled over and revealed a splattering of concern that was probably amplified by the pitiful sight Jack was offering the guy. “You got hit by that Nightmare today.”

The frost spirit teetered over to the bed so he had the promise of a soft landing when his legs gave out. “I thought you would’ve been too worried about your own hide to notice that.”

Pitch’s concern stuttered and was replaced for a brief instant with an expression that made Jack think the Nightmare King was just itching to hit him. “Stop being a brat and show me,” he demanded, pointing toward Jack’s stomach. “The Nightmare leaders can leach poison into flesh nowadays and it will be a pain if your organs fell out because of something I asked you to do.”

Jack rested his face in his hand as the nausea began to wash away again. When he was sure he could speak without throwing up, he glanced up at Pitch over the tips of his fingers. “Shouldn’t you at least buy me dinner before asking me to strip for you?”

Pitch blinked at Jack’s tease a second before a sharp smirk laced the corner of his mouth. “You don’t eat. And I don’t recall being offered a meal before you used your ‘magical fingers’ on me yesterday.”

Despite his queasiness, Jack managed a small laughed. “How can you even say that with a straight face?”

Pitch didn’t indulge him this time, though. The smirk faded just like Jack’s weak laughter. He let his hands drop from his abdomen and sat back on the bed, breathing in shallow breaths until the awful feeling had completely passed. “The Nightmare didn’t do anything besides head-butt me,” he eventually said, his lie coming out a little frailer than it should have been. “It’s just tension from having someone I won’t mention hate on me so regularly.”

Pitch stared at Jack for a long moment, and the frost spirit couldn’t help but curl up a little under the intensity of that look. Just as Jack was about to defend his story – and probably over defend it, to be honest – Pitch jolted, as if realising something.

Rubbing his hand over his face, he sat down heavily on the edge of the bed beside the frost spirit.  
“Jack, if you want me to trust you, you shouldn’t immediately lie right to my face.”

Jack flinched in surprise – surely he hadn’t been _that_ transparent – but then Pitch was giving him a sidelong gaze that looked almost offended and Jack’s mouth went dry. “Some of what you said may be true, but I can see the fear _coiling_ and it’s not _yours_.”

He looked pointedly at Jack’s stomach. “Why don’t you want me to fix it?”

Jack just shook his head and stood to get away from him. “Because it’s fine.”

“You’re being evasive.”

_And weak. Running, just like that fire spirit says you do. Grow a fucking spine and let Pitch be useful for once. He’ll be repulsed by you either way so let him see them._

Anger and hurt knotted in Jack’s throat, and the spirit abruptly spun back toward the man and stomped right into Pitch’s space. He slapped his hands down on the Nightmare King’s thighs and Pitch tensed, the startled beginnings of wary confusion welling into his eyes. Dropping his voice into a purr not unlike the ones Pitch had used on him before, Jack murmured, “Would you take your clothes off for me, Pitch?”

The man just stared at him with a look that seemed on the verge of darkening, jaw working as he tried to figure Jack out, and the frost spirit’s voice hardened. He let go of Pitch’s warm trousers and said, “I remember you being less than friendly to Skreek when he wanted you to offer up your shirt in our card game, so stop _pushing_ me if you can’t even do the same.”

Pitch’s jaw halted and clenched tightly. He glared up at Jack. “If I have doubts concerning your genuineness, it is because of _this_.”

Jack stepped back as Pitch rose to his full height. The man was looming, as he did so _well_ , and Jack wanted to sweep himself up onto a wind to make himself taller for once. To make Pitch feel as small as a snowflake about to be trodden on.

He wanted to hurt Pitch like he’d hurt him.

_GOOD, SOME COMMON SENSE! Now just –_

Pitch’s fingers knitted in the front of Jack’s hoodie, but instead of hauling the frost spirit to his toes, Pitch let the tips of his fingers dig into the fabric. Press into the cold flesh that waited two layers beneath. He began to push Jack back with a force that had the spirit stumbling but never actually falling.

“I don’t know anything about you, Jack,” Pitch said, low and angry, only this time Jack didn’t feel like the words were being thrown at him. His half-half eyes were watching Jack so closely as he forced the spirit to move, and his voice dropped even lower when he added, “Every day I spend with you, you keep surprising me. I keep _getting_ surprised. I am not _good_ with surprises.”

Jack’s lip nearly quirk at how miserable Pitch looked regarding the fact. _I know_ , he wanted to say, but then his back hit the wall and the air flew right out of his lungs without getting the chance to be turned into sound.

Pitch tightened his hold on Jack’s clothes. “I am constantly left trying to reconcile the you I see with that ice cold anger in your eyes, or a cutting grin on your face, with the Jack Frost that the Guardians adore for being full of fun and childish audacity.”

Jack bit at the inside of his cheek, fingers itching to claw Pitch’s hand off his hoodie before they could have a repeat of Kitrashin. But the man let go before Jack could properly try, and his voice fell even lower, velvet tones turning into a rough murmur as he said, “If you and Skreeklavic think I have trust issues – and I will deny any such accusation if it is ever mentioned, no matter how plausible it is considering the _filth_ I’ve had to put up with over the centuries – then put yourself in my shoes when you act so cagey.”

Jack’s insides clenched at what Pitch was insinuating. “I’m not _like_ them,” he argued. “I’m not like the psychos you’ve had to deal with in the past.”

Pitch looked, at the very least, like he wanted to believe him. “You told me to stop assuming your motives. So help me by telling me exactly what you’re trying to do.”

Jack’s breath caught. Here it was. The perfect opening. The ideal moment to ruin his chance of ever having something close to a friendship with Pitch. Skreek’s words entered his head again, urging Jack to just be _direct_ , but Jack didn’t know _how_ to be direct. The crush Havið had exposed so long ago…it had been _so long ago_ …

But if Skreek was right, if everything Jack had ever witnessed about spirits had been right…

“ _We never change_ ,” he breathed, an inaudible whisper that barely had his lips moving at all. Pitch’s eyes dropped to the movement, a frown pulling at his forehead and he tilted Jack’s head up with briefest touch of his thumb on a cold jaw.

However, his thoughts were having none of it.

_If you open your mouth he’ll laugh at you, mock you. See you cast out and humiliated and every bit of confidence you own will crumble. He’ll twist it, like he can twist anything, and turn whatever revolting sentiment you’re cooking up into something horrible._

His thoughts’ promise sunk in a little too deep as Pitch crowded Jack against the wall. Skimming eyes beginning to flicker with bright gold between Jack’s chest and his face, Pitch’s frown deepened and his voice demanded to know, “Why are you afraid?”

Jack looked away from him, tried to sink into the plaster to get away from him. “I’m a coward.”

“You are anything but,” Pitch countered. “So this –” he pushed two fingers into Jack’s chest, pressing the spirit against the wall “– isn’t necessary.”

Jack’s heart began to pound under the pressure of Pitch’s fingers.

_You think he’s going to be kind to you now that you’ve spent some time together and saved his ass? He’s indebted to you because of your actions. Anything he does is out of pity, obligation. Nothing is genuine._

More fear and uncertainty gurgled into existence, the monster bubbling up from the thick tar pit with a sickening sloshing. Jack pushed Pitch’s touch away from him, giving his heart room to move again. “If you just feel like you owe me…”

Pitch just slapped his hand away and buried his fingers in Jack’s collarbone, an entire hand now splayed on Jack’s chest, holding him in place. “You sorely overestimate my character if you think I would do anything out of obligation,” he uttered, eyes too bright and too close glaring down at Jack. “Tell whatever is happening in your chest to stop because _you_ dug this grave, Jack, and everything about lying in it goes against all of my instincts. So you have to tell me what you _want_ , not what you fear, if you don’t want me to assume the worst.”

Jack’s chest heaved under the weight of Pitch’s hand, under the weight of what the man was asking of him. His thoughts were telling him that Pitch wouldn’t even listen if he tried, but _would he_? Skreek had told him to give it a go – give whatever a go – so _would he_ _listen_?

When Jack made no move to reply, anger dashed across Pitch’s face and his fingers curled. He moved so very close, intimidatingly close under any other circumstances, and Jack stopped breathing when the Nightmare King hissed, “ _Tell me_.”

But it was too late. Jack’s words had dried up in his throat. His thoughts were buzzing angrily like a swarm of insects, so loud he could barely string together a coherent sentence himself.

Just as genuine panic began to bash at whatever strength the frost spirit might have had left, there was a niggle somewhere in his chest. A timid plea. His heart was begging him with tiny pulls like a child tugging on the corner of a shirt, because it knew what Jack wanted.

It wanted him to let go of his fear so the bright glowing gold in Pitch’s eyes could disappear. It wanted to just _stay_ with Pitch without every conversation being a mere prelude to a fight, or the aching aftermath of one. It wanted Jack to use the bravery it held especially for him and put it to good use – a selfish, childish use, and one that might end in pain. But also one that might not.

It wanted him to let the feral, shivering, scratching, _whimpering_ dog inside so it could stop being so _cold_.

His thoughts stopped mid-rant the moment Jack’s hands started moving.

_Don’t you fucking dare_ , they snarled.

But before they could blind him with seizing pain, Jack breathed, “Watch me.”

One hand clamped onto the fingers Pitch had splayed on his chest, and with the other he reached up and grabbed Pitch’s shirt by its laces and dragged the man down so he could reach his mouth.

The kiss was a hard press of lips that honestly couldn’t really be called a kiss at all. Jack had witnessed entangled lovers before and he was pretty sure he was meant to be moving his mouth, pretty sure Pitch was too. But the Nightmare King had gone rigid the moment they’d made contact, and all Jack could feel was an anxious dread pooling in his gut while his heart waited, still and lifeless, for how Pitch was going to react.

Jack’s eyes opened – he hadn’t even realised he’d closed them – and he tipped back from Pitch after only a few moments. He was more than certain that he’d done a terrible job, but it seemed to have gotten the message across. When Jack chanced a look at Pitch, the Nightmare King was staring down at him with realisation openly dawning on his face.

Jack let him go with a small twitch, felt Pitch’s hand fall from his chest, and flickered his eyes past the Nightmare King, over to where his staff sat on the bed. If the man was going to swing at him, Jack was going to have to roll ninja-style and –

A warm hand settled back on Jack’s throat, but this time gentler than any touch before it. A thumb pressed in just under his chin to tilt his head up. The comprehension on Pitch’s face was starting to fade into something darker, something Jack couldn’t gauge at all. It made everything inside him sit static in dreadful anticipation while Pitch’s body heat seeped into his skin, permeated the spirit’s cold and bruised his jawline like the Nightmare’s poison.

The gold in the man’s eyes taunted him as it danced luminously, and Jack abruptly felt like _he_ was the flake of snow about to be stepped on.

“What did I say about _surprising_ me?” Pitch murmured.

Jack tried to pull away but Pitch’s fingers dug into his skin, holding him fast. “Do it all the time ‘cause you love it?”

The gold Jack so loathed began to diminish. “I wonder.”

His bravery waned and acceptance settled like the dead sediment at the bottom of a lake. Pitch was going to reject him, wasn’t he? Probably start choking him again for being so strange and no amount of rationalisation was going shift the blame away from Jack.

This was going to end with Jack crying into a loaf of cake and wasn’t that just so _sad_.

He steeled himself, told his heart to stop clutching at its strings because he’d always known that this would end badly. What could Pitch even possibly see in something like him anyway?

His head tipped further, until his entire marred throat was exposed, until Jack’s eyes fell half shut so he could keep his gaze on Pitch. “Just let me go if you’re not interested.”

The stony words made Pitch’s entire expression shift. The darkness spread like dusk being drawn across his face and something like a smile, or a biting bow, curved the corner of his mouth. “Who said I wasn’t interested?”

Heat pressed against Jack’s mouth a second time, and the frost spirit’s eyes widened in shock as Pitch’s hand moved from his throat to his hair and yanked him closer.

_Wait, he’s…he’s not telling me to get lost? That I’m disgusting for even trying?_

A wet tongue licked at his lips, and Jack opened his mouth with a shudder. His eyes fell closed, the image of charcoal watching him burning into the back of his eyelids. Pitch’s mouth was so warm, his tongue hot and probing and Jack’s legs began to shake. His entire body was shaking. He was going to pass out in a minute, and it wasn’t going to be because he didn’t know how to breathe like this.

Heat coaxed at Jack’s mouth, tempting the frost spirit into moving, and Jack tentatively began to do his best to kiss back. To return the heat Pitch was searing through Jack’s mouth with a cold that knew no real technique, but would be willing to give anything a try just so it could experience the sensation of thawing under warm caresses.

His fingertips touched the sides of Pitch’s neck. The Nightmare King flinched, drawing back the barest inch from Jack’s face. Not wanting this to end so soon, the frost spirit pushed forward on his toes and grazed his mouth against Pitch’s. The man shivered, letting Jack move against him as he drew icy hands up the nape of his neck.

Pitch let go of Jack’s hair and raked his nails down the back of his head, his spine, drawing the spirit flush up against Pitch’s body and sending any and all of Jack’s reason scattering. Then Pitch grabbed Jack’s hips and roughly slammed him back into the wall.

The spirit gasped. A tiny, breathless laugh fell from his lips before Pitch was there again, growling against Jack’s mouth and holding him so tightly he could feel an ache where Pitch’s fingers were pressing in too hard, the pain searing heat through his lower half. He grabbed at Pitch’s hair, at his nape, digging in his fingers as Pitch’s teeth grazed Jack’s bottom lip and the frost spirit trembled.

Large, warm hands skimmed so temptingly down Jack’s thighs, dragging the heat with them. Pitch murmured something against his mouth, something Jack was not coherent enough to register, a heartbeat before those warm fingers returned to Jack’s abused hipbones.

And then slipped over his waistband to meet cold flesh.

Abruptly, Jack’s lust fled, and panic instantly welled in its place. He tore his mouth away from Pitch, tried to snatch at his hands to get them off him. “Pitch, don’t –”

But the mouth Jack had abandoned simply left Jack’s lips to trace a hot, wet line down the side of Jack’s neck and _bite_.

He moaned, panting as heat and pain lanced through his skin.

And before he could reassemble whatever was left of his wits, there were four warm fingers pressing into Jack’s stomach and he felt a pull, like threads being wrenched from his skin.

He choked on a groan as Pitch let go of his neck, and Jack’s forehead fell into the man’s collarbone as everything was _leeched_ from his abdomen. He was breathing heavily, panting cold breaths into Pitch’s skin, and right by his cheek he could feel the Nightmare King’s heart thumping unevenly.

The yanking sensation faded and Pitch’s fingers dragged down over Jack’s navel before falling away altogether.

Jack swallowed thickly as he tried to even out his breathing. “You’re…sneaky…”

The Nightmare King pressed his head into the wall beside Jack, and when the spirit looked up, he saw that Pitch’s eyes were squeezed shut and exhaustion pinched at his features.

“You’re stupid,” he ground out. Jack jolted, whatever concern he might have been harbouring evaporating in favour of being offended. But then Pitch opened grey eyes and stared down at Jack with a tired expression. “But you might have a point.”

“About what exactly?” Jack asked warily. His lips felt bruised, a warm prickling of pain still tickled at his neck, and he wanted to just _enjoy_ the aftermath of his kiss, damnit. He didn’t want to think of the sort of expression he was meant to make if Pitch was about to tell him that he wasn’t interested after all. That Jack was such a bad kisser it had just turned him off the whole idea already.

A gold ring appeared around Pitch’s pupils, and Jack swore quietly. A smirk lifted Pitch’s mouth as he looked back at the wall. “I think I would find myself displeased if you were to be cut into pieces,” he confessed. “By me or anyone else. Apparently that means I don’t hate you that much after all.”

Simple pleasure whirled into Jack’s chest and the spirit couldn’t help but smile. Bravely, he reached up and brushed his fingers gently over Pitch’s chest. The man twitched, but didn’t make to smack Jack away. “Would you be my knight in shining armour, Pitch? Avenge my death by filling the dreams of my killers with dismembered corpses?”

Pitch’s expression held more than a healthy amount of interest, even though he said, “That’s not something a Guardian of fun should be saying.”

Jack had at least five one-liners ready to throw back at him, but before he could put a voice to any of them, Pitch winced, his expression contorting. He pushed away from Jack and sat on the bed, a hand pressed against his heart.

Concern tugging at him, Jack rephrased his smart comeback and asked, “Will you be okay?”

Instead of brushing him off like had in the banshee’s house, Pitch admitted quietly, “I think…I just need sleep. Or to frighten a schoolhouse full of children.”

Jack’s eyebrows drew together. “Do you usually need sleep when you’re like this?”

Pitch managed a weak and very self-loathing laugh before he collapsed back on the quilt. “I do not usually find myself so drained, so who knows.”

Jack scratched at the back of his neck, but figured a king of dream states would know whether or not falling asleep would help his case. “There are no schoolhouses around, so you can have this room. The wardrobe in here is super sweet.”

Pitch shook his head. “I’m not even going to ask.”

_Have a fun time getting ready in the morning, then_ , Jack thought with a grin at the mental image of the man’s reaction to the wardrobe’s heartfelt compliments.

Without warning, the ever-present humming in Jack’s head increased in volume. For whatever merciful reason, it had eerily quietened down while Jack had experienced his moment with Pitch, but now it was apparently sick of waiting for the moment to be over.

It reared up like a rising corpse and grabbed hold of Jack’s mind with splintered fingers.

_MOVE_ , it rumbled, louder and more frightening than it had ever sounded, and if Jack hadn’t been leaning against the wall he would have stumbled to the ground in shock.

Pitch shifted on the bed, leaning up to frown at Jack. Swallowing, the spirit worked his face into an easy expression, worked his hammering heart into a semblance of normality. He carefully walked over to retrieve his staff and gripped the thing like a lifeline.

He looked down at Pitch’s figure, propped up on his elbows, and wanted more than anything to just dive on top of the man and have him kiss Jack senseless again before Pitch had second thoughts. But the Nightmare King looked about ready to flake out and Jack felt a tightness coil in his gut, warning him to listen to his thoughts before something terrible happened.

He chewed on the inside of his cheek and quietly asked, “Are you going to change your mind about me when you wake up?”

Pitch blinked at him. Then something in his expression relaxed and he flopped back down. “If I do, I thoroughly doubt you cannot change it back again.”

Not exactly reassurance, but it wasn’t foreboding, at least. Jack reluctantly turned for the door. “Sweet dreams,” he threw back with a teasing smirk.

“I hope not,” the Nightmare King mumbled, already sounding halfway into unconsciousness.

Before he’d reached the door, Jack’s stomach shifted suddenly, turning violently, and whatever fragile happiness that had been cradled in the arms of Jack’s heart fell to pieces. The frost spirit slipped out of the room before the semi-consciousness Pitch could sense something was wrong and stumbled violently down the hallway.

The world began to spin as his stomach rolled, and he crashed to the floor at the top of the stairs. His staff went tumbling down the steps and Jack bit his tongue against a whine as everything inside him _moved_ and his head began to pound.

_This is what happens when you ignore everything I say_ , his thoughts snarled. They were so angry Jack could feel the rage prickle his skin. His heart kicked up, confused, as adrenaline spiked through his veins and Jack felt like he was about to fall apart.

“What are you doing?” he cried as his body shook. Nothing made sense, none of this was making any sense at all. He was going to unwind, tumble into fragments of meat and muscle and everything felt so wrong all of a sudden. There wasn’t pain, not anywhere except in his head, just this _wrongness_ that he couldn’t stomach at all. He wanted to peel himself out of his skin to escape it.

_I’m done with you_ , his thoughts uttered.

The nausea lurched, sending Jack onto his hands and knees, and the spirit threw up onto the floor.

Tears dribbled down his face, dripping icy salt water onto the floor, and Jack opened his eyes and felt everything inside him stop moving when he saw, surrounded by the wet droplets of his tears, a splattering of gold.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *wipes off sweat*
> 
> I only meant this to be two chapters (two because i didn't want to leave you guys with ANOTHER cliffhanger and have you hate me for it) and then it just kept going...
> 
> BUT THERE'S A KISS!! A KISS!!! 
> 
> and once again, thank you everyone for your kudos and comments! <3 and for putting up with these huge chapters


	15. When It Rains, Stay Indoors

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which uninvited faeries trample on Yves's immaculate lawn and nobody is in the mood to be polite.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> part I of the update

The water in Yves’s great lake was stagnant. Unmoving, it reflected the entire realm around it like a plate of glass, from the pumpkin fields to its right and the thick trees that hid the barracks off in the distance, to the small frost spirit sitting huddled by the water’s edge under a half-dead oak tree. It held the image of everything so still, so clear, almost as if one could dive into the water and end up in a world that was the perfect reflection of the present one.

And despite how much he loathed being submerged, Jack had contemplated the idea – for all of three seconds, but still.

Night-born darkness clung to anything and everything that’d remained stationary for a moment too long, and Jack figured that he, too, would soon become one of the night’s victims. As he sat and stared out at the glass lake before him, he could feel the darkness crawling toward him from the corners of the realm. Pressing, creeping, begging him to look its way just so it could drag itself up on his other side and devour him.

But despite the blatantly ominous approach of the darkness, Jack seemed to be the only one wary of being eaten by it. Off in the fields, he could hear Yves’s monsters cackling and screeching to each other as they usually did, and his own little monsters seemed utterly unperturbed by the sinister lack of light closing in around them.

Jack glanced at the pair of them, at the two scaries that had found and forever after kept Jack company the second he’d stepped outside of the house. Io, for once chivalrous enough to ignore the calls of the crows, was trying to perform some sort of crooked handstand on Jack’s left while the newly-named Mo snuggled into Jack’s other side, trying to leech strength from the spirit as it simultaneously offered reassurance.

And even if it came at a price, Jack was desperate enough to take any sort of comfort offered to him at that point. Especially since he was still trying to grasp what the _shit_ had happened to him earlier that evening…

_Stop running away and face the facts._

…but he knew what had happened, didn’t he. He knew and he was just trying not to accept the reality of it.

Because his thoughts had turned on him completely. No longer had they been content with just insulting the crap out of Jack, but they’d made him sick enough to throw up…whatever in hell’s name had worked its way up his throat.

“It’d been gold,” Jack murmured.

Gold that had curled up and off the floor and disappeared a moment after it had landed on it.

To make matters worse, there wasn’t even any evidence left. He’d scratched his fingers over the floor where the gold had been and felt nothing, _nothing_ , and Jack had sat back on his heels and started panicking at the thought that he’d hallucinated the whole fucking thing.

A sharp wind cut through the realm, causing the slightest of ripples to dash across the surface of the lake, and Jack ran his fingers through his hair. He didn’t know what was happening to himself anymore. The aggressive thoughts had been one thing – having spent close to a century on his own, Jack had learnt to deal with the quirks of his internal monologue – but the pain and the _gold_ …

And, fuck, the _slyness_ with which the thoughts operated when they knew force wouldn’t work on him. They had never functioned like that before, but now they could creep under Jack’s skin and so delicately place their seeds of doubt, burying them in places Jack would never find if he wasn’t paying close enough attention.

Jack remembered back to Yves’s hallway, saw himself kneeling over a clean patch of carpet in near hysterics, and recalled his thoughts offering him a quiet suggestion. A smooth, _Maybe it’s Pitch playing with your mind again_.

Back then, Jack had nearly screamed. He’d had to get the hell out of the house in order to be able to _breathe_ again, and even now, hours later, the _frustration_ just made him itch to dig fingers into his skin and claw the seeds out.

“Before they start growing,” he breathed, and for once his words captured the joint attention of Io and Mo. “Before they burst through my skin and Pitch stops liking me because I have _things_ sprouting out of me.”

_Not that he likes you anyway._

Jack made a hurt noise and the two scaries moved in closer to him. His hands were shaking, trembling violently where they now rested upon his knees. Io peered over his arm at them, wide mouth and sharp fangs moving too close to Jack’s fingers. He didn’t bother to move them away from Io, though. His synapses weren’t firing fast enough for that. But, thankfully, Mo made a sound at the taller scarie and hurried around Jack on four legs to push Io away from Jack protectively.

For some pitiful reason, the sight made Jack want to cry.

He forced himself to move, and curled his hands around his stomach and rested his head back against the tree as he bit back the tears. He felt so pathetic but he didn’t know what to _do_. Because he had to do something, _right_? Something that didn’t involve tearing off his skin because some rational part of his brain was alerting him to the fact that it probably wouldn’t be a good idea.

Jack’s mind rolled, searching, and blearily he realised that if the ever-grumpy thoughts were a product of his tar pit of a subconscious talking to him, if the pain was something connected to it all, then maybe he had to somehow convince his hidden mind that Pitch wasn’t as bad as it made him out to be. That everyone wasn’t. They could definitely be pieces of slime sometimes but they weren’t dirty enough to pull half the shit his thoughts accused them of.

Because aside from finding a way to silence the thoughts permanently, the only other alternative was listening to them. Listening to their words and returning to the Guardians to live out a life of merry children saving and he was okay with that, he was, but it wasn’t what he _wanted_ to do. Jack and his heart had some semblance of an idea of what they desired and it went against everything his thoughts told him to do.

His lip curled into something that could resemble a humourless smile as he muttered, “Congrats, Jack, you’re a masochist,” before his thoughts could pipe up and say something worse.

He didn’t want to leave. He didn’t want those vile thoughts to win because he’d kissed Pitch. _Kissed him_. And Pitch had kissed him back with enough interest to make Jack crumble.

The frost spirit might not own very many morals, but what had happened last night was important to him, and he wasn’t about to let any subconscious introspective asshole take this away from him.

So he was going to have to pull himself together and make it _stop_.

“Isn’t it a little morbid for you to spend so long gazing into a lake?”

Jack spooked at the new voice and looked up to see Phoenix wandering over to his little hideaway. The fire spirit had his hands in the pockets of his jeans, hair rumpled like he’d just rolled out of bed, and a familiar, tired squint on his face that reminded Jack of all the years he’d spent living with the guy.

They’d been terrible, _awful_ years, but Phoenix had always managed to make them a little better.

Io and Mo had disappeared at some point during Jack’s musings, so he shifted over so Phoenix could sit himself down beside him. Phoenix’s bare arm brushed against Jack’s cold sleeve as the fire spirit got comfortable, and just from the familiarity of the touch, Jack felt an easing sense of clarity help unwind a little of the mess in his head.

“Shouldn’t you be sleeping?” Jack asked, because even in this strange realm with stranger people Jack was still the only outcast with no need for closing his eyes and dreaming.

Phoenix jabbed a thumb toward the house and grunted, “I _couldn’t_. Somehow I ended up with the room next to Yves’s study and _Christ_ that man does not stop working.”

Okay, maybe one of two outcasts.

Thinking about how pained Yves had been over the grand influx of guests staying over in the realm, Jack grimaced. “We’ve probably given him a lot of trouble to sort out.”

“Or he’s just a machine. Either way, I figured you were still up and I wanted to talk to you about Tanton’s super great plan to save the werewolves.”

But Jack still felt too crappy to try and wrap his mind around complex theories (he had avoided yesterday’s convention for a _reason_ , goddamnit). In a tone that was probably a shade too dry to be completely friendly, he said, “If you’re looking to bounce intelligent theories off someone, I’m not your guy.”

Phoenix seemed a little taken back by his reply, and paused for a solid minute to glare at the frost spirit and the foetal position he’d folded himself into. “Frost, for the love of the _hottest_ circle of hell, what is going on with you? You’ve been in a shit mood for the last few days and usually I can handle your weird ass personality, but seriously –”

Jack groaned and sank his head into his knees. “God, I’m sorry, just do whatever you came here to do.”

“You know what? No.”

“Just _talk_ Phoenix.”

A pair of hot fingers poked into the back of his neck and Phoenix’s tone was as stubborn as the set of Skreek’s eyebrows during an argument when he said, “Not until you tell me what’s going on.”

Jack curled in tightener on himself. He hated it when Phoenix used that tone. Hated it because he knew the guy would never give in until he got what he wanted – and usually what he wanted was only ever relinquished after an all-out brawl and some staining bruises inflicted by (and on) both parties.

His fingers crept up to marks he had obtained from his last fight, the hand at his throat hidden in the folds of his body, and Jack squeezed his eyes shut. He’d gotten somewhere with Pitch last night. He was sure of it. And the only thing that really stood in the way of Jack freely and creatively convincing Pitch to be less of an asshole were those thoughts, that pain, the feeling of falling apart as he threw up incomprehensible fluids.

He wanted…no, he _needed_ help to make sure it didn’t happen again. This was a problem he needed to fix…and Phoenix had always been there to help him fix his problems before.

_You don’t want to talk about it._

“What do you mean you don’t want to talk about it? You think I’m giving you a choice here, Frost?”

Jack froze. He turned his head slightly in shock and felt a growing sickness at the sight of irritation on Phoenix’s face. But…he hadn’t opened his mouth just then, had he? Those words had just been thoughts…hadn’t they?

_Don’t you think it’s best not to say anything, especially when he’ll just think you’re crazy anyway?_

Dread slithered into Jack’s gut and he turned his face back into his knees. His thoughts…they were right. He didn’t want Phoenix to look at him the same way Bunny had in North’s office – like Jack was insane.

Jack shook his head and his heart constricted painfully. But he _wasn’t_ insane. This wasn’t some figment of his imagination. He needed to open his mouth and –

_Or am I?_

His nails bit into the sore marks on his neck, but the pain didn’t grant him any sense of lucidity. All that was going through his mind was that Phoenix would think he was a lunatic if he so much as opened his mouth. Jack knew enough about humans and how they treated people who talk to themselves too much, who scream at things nobody can see, who think their heads are talking back to them. He knew where those humans were kept, how people looked at them.

And he couldn’t stand if it Phoenix gave up on him like that.

Jack choked, enough of a mess that his voice came out broken, hoarse, as he begged Phoenix to just give in for once. “Please, Phoenix. I can’t. Just…talk to me. Talk to me. I can’t…”

“Fuck,” the fire spirit swore. “Fuck, okay, fine. Shit.” A hot hand ran through Jack’s hair, if only briefly, and for a fraction of a second Jack was soothed by the gentle touch. “Look, I came out here to give you a heads up since Tanton wants to use a batch of memory dissolving tea on the wolves.”

At any other point in time, Jack would have been asking how such a dangerous solution would be able to save the wolves from their problems. But since he was facing a few too many of his own at the moment, he simply nodded, indicating that he’d heard. Phoenix added, “Long story short, he reckons it’ll foil whatever grand plans the thing that’d attacked them may have had. It’ll probably work, from what I’ve heard. So that’s something.”

“I hope it works too,” Jack murmured. “But why are you telling me?”

“Because they need Pitch to use it.”

Jack looked up a little at the change in Phoenix’s voice. The husky timbre had shifted into something less comfortable, something with an edge that Jack couldn’t quite interpret. The fire spirit noticed he’d regained Jack’s attention and continued, “He hasn’t agreed to help yet, but Tanton thinks this is the best shot the wolves have of not…”

Phoenix’s expression pinched, the night’s shadows drawing into the deep cracks across his forehead, and he looked away from Jack. The frost spirit swallowed. He reached out a hand to touch Phoenix, perhaps to console whatever had been eating at him since their visit to Skreek’s fortress. But he hesitated before his fingers landed on the fire spirit’s shoulder, his wrist twitched, and he drew the entire arm back.

Once composed again, the fire spirit glanced at Jack, questioning his silence. Figuring he had some similar motives to Skreek in mind, Jack said, “If you’re here to tell me to convince him –”

Phoenix’s eyes popped wide and he gasped, appalled. “You think I want that creepy bastard here? I’d rather Skreek do what he said yesterday and hire a psychic to do his dirty work –”

Jack snorted. “Eavesdropper.”

“ – because at least then I wouldn’t have to pull my hair out worryin’ that Pitch being so close to the fumes of that tea might _jog_ something.”

The amusement fell out of Jack with the abruptness of a grocery bag breaking. Now his apples were rolling away from him, escaping their fate as they tumbled across a busy parking lot, and acute irritation flickered in Jack’s chest at the thought that it was all Phoenix’s fault. “What,” he uttered a little too coldly.

Unfazed by the chill or Jack’s scattering produce, Phoenix tilted his chin up as if prepping for a fight. “You heard me.”

Phoenix was right to brace himself for anger. Jack sat up straighter and looked the fire spirit in the eyes as he tried to figure out what could possess Phoenix to be so unforgivably uncensored at the least opportune times. “The tea doesn’t work like that,” Jack ground out, and a tight feeling grabbed at his stomach when he saw the fire spirit’s eyebrows climb onto his forehead. “Why are you looking at me like that? The dissolving solution doesn’t _jog_ anything. It does the complete opposite. You _know_ that.”

“I do know that. But the tea is magical. The _fae_ kind of magic, which can be unpredictable as shit sometimes. If it triggers something in the guy’s brain, then we’re gonna be as good as dead, Frost.”

Jack shook his head, unwilling to listen to Phoenix’s dumb logic. “It won’t happen.”

“Frost –”

“That’s not how the tea works,” he snapped. He glared at Phoenix and saw that his arm was dripping with water, melted frost from Jack’s anger rolling off his skin before it’d even had a chance to get a proper hold. Jack took a deep breath and said in the firmest tone he could manage, “He won’t remember. And he hasn’t even agreed to help yet so what are you so worried about.”

Phoenix looked utterly unconvinced as the water on his arm evaporated and it only made Jack want to punch him. “Maybe you should stay away from him just in case.”

Jack stared at the fire spirit for a moment. He stared at the night-darkness caught on the edges of Phoenix’s face, at the way it dimmed his ember-lit eyes. He stared until his brain decided to turn over and he realised what had come out of Phoenix’s mouth.

And when he did, _pain_ – and frustration and the barest hint of _betrayal_ – shot straight through Jack’s chest. “Hah,” he breathed, getting to his feet before any of his violent inclinations could have him breaking Phoenix’s face. “Fuck, not you too.”

“What?” Phoenix yelled at him as Jack started off into the darkness. “Frost!”

“Leave me alone, Phoenix.”

A growl of thunder rumbled overhead, and with a start Jack looked up to see clouds draw ever so fast across the sky. In ripples they flocked and gathered until the deep purple sky turned a midnight black and the entire realm grew even darker.

There was another roar of thunder and a flash, like lightning, off beyond the trees.

Before Jack could turn back to Phoenix, to see if the fire spirit knew what on earth was happening, a shudder tore across the sky and Yves’s heavens split open.

Rain began to _pour_.

Phoenix shrieked, and forgetting his anger Jack burst out in startled laughter as the fire spirit bolted for the house. The rain sizzled whenever it touched Phoenix’s skin, steam curling off into the air only to be driven through by more raindrops.

Curses flew as Phoenix ran, and Jack would have stuck around to admire the view, but as soon as he was coherent enough to stop laughing, he realised that the rain tearing down from the sky was a hell of a lot heavier than anything he’d been caught under in his everyday wanderings. Phoenix’s voice was drowned out once he was a few yards away, and when he realised that the ground beneath his feet had started to turn to mud, Jack pulled his hood up and dashed after the fire spirit.

The rain crashed over the house in pounding waves, filling the warm kitchen with a deafening roar that was barely muffled when a gust of wind following Jack slammed the back door shut. Water pelted against the glass and for some reason Jack felt oddly safe, like the house was protecting him from a threat Jack usually had to fly cross-country to escape.

Dripping water in the doorway of the kitchen, Jack sidled up to a muttering Phoenix, who was producing enough uncomfortably hot air to blow-dry their clothes.

Despite the deafening weather outside, though, it didn’t take long for the tinkling of piano playing to reach Jack’s ears (the piano was apparently determined enough not to be drowned out by mere rain). With a tinge of guilt at how self-absorbed he’d been when the banshee had been alone all night in the creaky attic by herself, Jack peered at Phoenix.

“How’s our child doing?” he asked.

Phoenix’s first reaction was to snort, and then, probably realising that whatever argument they’d been having outside hadn’t been brought into the house, met Jack’s eyes and opened his mouth.

Only for his gaze to drop to Jack’s throat.

Jack immediately clamped his hand over his skin, but it was too late. Face contorting in rage, the fire spirit let out an angry hiss and suddenly Jack had a whole lot of Phoenix up in his grill.

“Whoa, Phoenix –”

Jack’s hand was pried off his throat by scorching fingers, and Phoenix’s positively livid expression warned him to shut the hell up.

“Who left these on you?” he demanded, eyes raking over the bruises as he manhandled Jack’s chin up to get a better look at what must have been a mess of purple. Jack winced at the heat of Phoenix’s fingers and the fire spirit growled, “Frost, fucking answer me.”

Jack shoved him away, less than willing to have a set of blistered finger marks to match the bruises. “It was a fight, Phoenix. Back off.”

Realisation caught in Phoenix’s eyes, and somehow it managed to make the spirit madder. “You’re saying that asshole did this? Damnit, Frost, if he so much as –”

“Coming from the guy who set me on fire last week?” Jack snapped.

Phoenix recoiled as if he’d been physically struck, and a trace of guilt bubbled near Jack’s heart. But it was brief, just like the appearance of Phoenix’s pain, and in the next moment the fire spirit pulled his face back into a deadly glower. “If I see another bruise on you I’m going to kill him.”

“I’d like to see you try.”

The two spirits whirled in shock at the sound of the very man Phoenix was so openly threatening. Jack’s heart thudded at the sight of a sleep-mussed Pitch looking as ominous as ever as he stood in the kitchen doorway, darkening it considerably with his presence. The Nightmare King’s eyes flashed gold when they met Jack’s, and the frost spirit had to look away lest his panic returned.

He glanced back at Phoenix and when he saw the look on the spirit’s face, his breath slipped from his lungs. For a laughable second, he saw heat in Phoenix’s eyes as the spirit glared at Pitch over Jack’s shoulder, a simmering burn that promised hell and Jack _knew_ that look because it was the same one that clawed over his own face whenever Phoenix was hurt. It held the same darkness he himself had felt in Skreek’s fortress when the werewolf had yelled at Phoenix, only what had been coiling inside Jack was always considerably colder.

If this was what Jack had looked like on Skreek’s ramparts, then no wonder Pitch had given him shit about it.

“Phoenix,” Jack murmured. When the fire spirit didn’t respond, Jack whacked him in the shin with his staff. “ _Phoenix_. Go find Yves and ask him what’s going on.”

Phoenix looked beyond peeved. “You think I take orders from you?”

“It’s a request. _Please_.”

After a hard look, Phoenix mumbled something unkind and shoved past Jack. He didn’t meet Pitch’s eyes again as he stomped out of the kitchen, but he also didn’t bother with civility as he forced his way through Pitch’s roadblock and up the stairs.

As soon as Phoenix was gone, Pitch slumped against the doorframe, still half-glaring over his shoulder at the path the fire spirit had taken. Jack wiped a dry sleeve over the corner of his face that hadn’t been dried by Phoenix’s body heat.

“Did the rain wake you up?” Jack asked quietly.

Pitch looked at him then, gold still a bright ring around his pupils, and Jack’s own eyes skittered away involuntarily.

After a lingering moment, he saw movement in his periphery (didn’t hear footsteps, and probably wouldn’t have even if the rain hadn’t been thundering outside like it held some vendetta against all ground-dwelling creatures) and managed by virtue of brute strength alone not to flinch when he heard Pitch’s voice by his shoulder. “Have you finally come to your senses and decided to fear me, Jack?” the Nightmare King asked, his voice deep and rich with sleep and fuck, the sound went straight down Jack’s spine despite the less than seductive words Pitch was uttering.

“Still not afraid,” Jack murmured, and shivered when warm breath touched the side of his ear.

“Pity.”

Jack breathed a small laugh, relaxing a little, and his eyes bravely flickered over Pitch’s face once the Nightmare King had retreated to his full height. “Your hair looks ridiculous, by the way,” he said with a small grin as he took note that the man looked considerably healthier than he had last night.

Offence tugged at the corner of Pitch’s mouth, and Jack’s grin widened when the man reached up to run fingers through his dark mop. “I mean,” Jack added, “it always looks ridiculous. But now it’s even worse. Didn’t the wardrobe give you any styling tips? Like maybe directions toward a brush.”

“I will have you know that, as per the warning I admittedly should have properly heeded last night, the wardrobe had nothing but flattering things to say.”

Jack saw straight through that bullshit, and his grin turned a little wicked. “It scared the shit out of you, didn’t it.”

Gold-silver eyes narrowed, and it could have been his imagination, but Jack couldn’t detect the abundance of hostility that would have been striped all over Pitch’s face if Jack had said this shit to him a couple of weeks ago. “I am the Nightmare King, frost spirit,” Pitch said with his usual dousing of ego. “I do not get _scared_.”

“Shocked, then? Traumatised? _Surprised_?”

Pitch’s eyes dug straight into him at the sound of the last suggestion, and Jack twitched a little under the careful intensity of that stare.

Yves (probably purposefully) chose that exact moment to gracefully stumble down his staircase and catch sight of the two of them standing in the kitchen. He raised a judging eyebrow at Jack as he shucked on an olive green suit jacket, and Jack tried his damnedest not to blush like a teenage girl caught flirting with her crush.

Phoenix, running hands lit with fire through his hair, tumbled out of the staircase behind Yves with substantially less poise as he exclaimed, “How about the roof? Is the attic water proof? If Lani is gonna get soaked she can have my room, and Frost and I can move the piano down too.”

Jack was honestly a little thankful for the diversion, and as Yves rolled his eyes in annoyance at the fire spirit’s pestering, Jack asked, “Lani?”

Phoenix spared only the briefest glance at Pitch, who was glaring at the rain outside as he clearly stood too close to Jack for Phoenix’s liking, before giving Jack a dry look. “You’re a sad excuse of a parent, Frost. Lani is the banshee you picked up.”

Pitch shifted, and the movement caught Jack’s eye just long enough for him to notice a weird look pass over the Nightmare King’s face. It was gone quickly enough, though, and Jack put it from his mind as he focused back on Phoenix. “ _We_ picked up,” he corrected. “Is she doing okay?”

Phoenix shrugged as Yves fixed up his tie in the reflection of a portrait on a nearby wall. “She was happy enough an hour or so ago. The piano was letting her play some notes and I left food for her to eat before I came out looking for you. But if the roof’s leaking then we’re gonna have to move her –”

“My roof does not leak, crispy Phoenix,” Yves snipped at the fire spirit. Phoenix rolled his eyes at the owner of the house, but the set of his shoulders relaxed a little. Jack smiled at the sight of Phoenix being so damn doting. He was so much like an overprotective mother at times, it almost made up for how frequently he swore and set things on fire.

Almost.

“What is presently more pressing,” Yves continued between gritted teeth, “is that someone is trying to get into my realm.” Everyone’s eyes swung to Yves as the man paused, head tilted toward the front of the house, and his eyes narrowed. “Faeries?”

A memory of a gathering of cloaked, masked individuals on North’s doorstep flashed through Jack’s mind and he tensed. He felt Pitch’s golden gaze fall onto him, and made the mistake of looking up at the man for the briefest moment.

_Searching for comfort in the embodiment of fear is laughably foolish._

Jack noticed the closed-off look that had fallen across Pitch’s features, almost like he was judging Jack for his fear. With a confused twitch of his eyebrow, Jack bit his lip and his eyes quickly strafed back to Yves. “Do you usually have faeries come visit?” he asked carefully, conscious of Pitch’s gaze still glued to the side of his face, as if the Nightmare King was searching for something beneath his skin.

Yves promptly turned on his heel and began stalking toward the front of the house. In a very definite tone, he called back, “No.”

“What’s going on?” Skreek asked as he came clunking down the stairs.

Yves pushed straight past him on his way to the front door and said, “Uninvited visitors.”

Skreek, like the grand werewolf overlord he was, went on alert instantly. He ambled after the suited man, prepared to take on anyone who dared to trespass on Yves’s territory regardless of the appropriateness of his current outfit (which happened to be a set of pyjamas with tiny howling dogs on them).

Phoenix hurried after them with a low curse, but before Jack could follow, Pitch made a quite sound beside him – a sound that was barely louder than the pelting rain outside, but just enough that it caught Jack before he could leave.

“He’s letting them in?” Pitch asked mildly.

Jack felt something like an itch pull at his skin, uncomfortable and foreboding, and words were on his tongue before he’d even realised they were put there. “Do you know who they are?”

Pitch’s hairless brows furrowed in the barest hint of accusation. “Do _you_?”

“I hope I don’t,” Jack replied quietly, truthfully. Pitch’s eyes widened a little at the honesty, but then Phoenix was calling for him from across the house and Jack was abandoning Pitch and whatever the Nightmare King looked like he wanted to say.

The monsoonal downpour ceased the instant Yves stepped out from under the safety of his porch, and from the doorway in which the two spirits stood, Jack heard the distinct sound of evil crows cawing as the birds flocked to Yves’s side. Black beady eyes watched their master from where they sat perched across the porch banisters, along the gutter, scattered across the glistening grass in tiny dark spots. An illusion of a moon swirled into existence in the sky, illuminating the front lawn with an eerie silver glow that seemed to catch on every eyeball in the vicinity.

If Yves was trying to set an intimidating scene, he was doing a damn good job of it.

A sprinkling of crimson light flickered in the middle of Yves’s footpath, and the man stopped in his tracks as the visitors teleported onto the lawn in a waft of red glitter.

The second Jack’s brain recognised the cloaks and the masks and realised that his worst fears had been confirmed, his breath whooshed out of him like he’d been punched.

“Shit,” he whispered, and Phoenix swung to him.

“Do you know these freaks?”

“They’re from the Court,” Jack murmured, and his joints locked up the second one made eye contact with him. Shit, he couldn’t duck and hide now, could he? In a hoarse whisper, he added, “Came to North’s the other day to ask him a bunch of questions.”

“Imperials?” Skreek growled from where he was standing amongst the curtains off to Jack’s left. “What are they sniffing around for?”

The one staring at Jack raised a finger and pointed straight at him.

“Fuck,” Phoenix breathed as Skreek muttered a few choice words himself. Yves turned and his eyes narrowed when he saw Jack and Phoenix in the doorway. “Why is that bastard pointing at you, Frost?”

“I don’t know,” Jack whispered.

But he figured he was about to find out, since he had little other option at this point than to talk to the fae. Legging it would only plaster a giant “guilty” stamp on his forehead, and since he didn’t even know if they were here to accuse him of something or just ask for something stupid like directions, it would probably be unwise to tempt the fae into arresting him because of cowardice alone.

Behind him, Jack noticed blearily, Pitch had taken up residence leaning back against the ebony dining table, his arms crossed over his chest while is eyes evaluated Jack in all his spineless glory.

Taking a shaking breath, Jack’s heart picked up its pace in his chest as he stepped out onto the porch. The crows either side of him cawed, either laughing at him or trying to lend some moral support, and Jack treaded onto the still-damp footpath.

Then heavy boots were clomping behind him, and Jack turned a surprised glare onto the fire spirit. “What are you doing?” he hissed.

Phoenix kept his eyes trained on the faeries ahead of them as he muttered, “Coming with you. I ain’t sending my only protégé off to the slaughter by himself.”

Jack gave him a look. “In what universe am I your protégé?”

“The one where I taught you how to be a badass.”

“You did no such thing.”

“Don’t be a snivelling –”

Yves brushed past them, probably having been dismissed by the faeries, and he slapped a hand onto Jack’s shoulder. Jack jolted, and swallowed when Yves, face cast in a silver light and his eyes lit with rage, growled, “If they give you any trouble, you come and get me.”

Jack and Phoenix both nodded, and Yves tightened his grip for a fraction of a second before prying his fingers off Jack’s hoodie. “And do not _lie_ to them,” he added in a lower, but by no means less severe, tone. Yves sent both of them meaningful looks before he strode past them and back into the house.

A rattled breath gushed out of Phoenix’s lungs, and Jack tightened his grip on his staff.

“Phoenix Von Cinder and Jack Frost,” one of the fae announced as they got closer. “Guess we get to kill two birds with one stone today.”

They’d wanted Phoenix too? Shit. _They definitely didn’t come here for directions, then._

Feeling less assured in his future than a second ago, Jack scanned the Imperials warily. Their black masks were half grey in the false moonlight, their cloaks bleached of colour like some greyscale painting. The only prominent aspect of them was the shiny sword carried by the swordsman standing on the edge of the group, the handle so polished it practically glowed.

Phoenix glared at them. “If you’re here to murder us I don’t recommend doing it on Yves’s footpath. Bloodstains and all.”

Another one snickered, ignorant to the fact that Phoenix was being dead serious about Yves’s aversion to carnage residue on his pavers. “We’re not allowed to execute anyone unless they tell us something we don’t like.”

His instincts, surprisingly on the ball today, prodded at Jack. He flicked a look to the fae with the sword, and the asshole stared straight back at him.

Phoenix made an unimpressed noise. “Did you lot come here just to threaten us? You faeries must be really overstaffed if they needed six of you to do the job.”

One of them made a rude comment, at which Phoenix narrowed his eyes. But then the faerie in front of the pack silenced the murmuring with a raised hand and addressed the spirits. “You two are familiar with the Holomire people and their realm.”

“It _is_ why you’re on the list,” the faerie flanking him commented.

Jack frowned at them, and Phoenix’s head tilted back a bit. “What about it?”

“We have shared documents of every visitor who has ever entered the realm, and you two were on the guest list for the last stay anyone ever made in the realm. Is this true?”

Jack’s throat tightened. They…they wanted information about something that happened so long ago? It had been…what, a hundred and fifty years at least since…since…

_“Do not lie to them,”_ Yves had said.

Jack looked at Phoenix helplessly, only to see that the fire spirit’s face was set in a mask of stone. “We were. Our boss was invited to attend a conference and we were required to accompany him.”

The fae all looked to the shifty guy carrying the sword. After a moment, he nodded, and the rest of the faeries looked back at Jack and Phoenix.

_Is this some kind of test?_ Jack thought as he sized up the sword guy again.

A faerie that Jack immediately labelled as a dickhead decided to mentioned, “Invitations into the Holomire forest are pretty hard to come by.”

Phoenix just glared at him. “Was that meant to be a question?”

But the faerie was prevented from snapping back at Phoenix by another raised hand. The apparent ball-squeezer of the group set a hard gaze on Jack and Phoenix. “Was everything well when you were there? Any trouble that might have led to their guards shutting their borders?”

Surprising him, Phoenix cast Jack a look, handing over the reins. The frost spirit swallowed and said, “It was pretty peaceful. Just…political arm-wrestling and faeries trying to get us to eat their food.”

Phoenix snorted. “As they do.”

“So you don’t know what happened to the realm and its people?”

Jack shook his head slowly. “No? What happened?”

The fae all looked to the sword guy again, but this time he didn’t answer their silent question straight away. He stared Jack down for a solid minute, during which Jack would have broken out in a sweat if he could have.

Then, gradually, his head dipped in a nod.

The breath Jack didn't even know _why_ he’d been holding gushed out of his lungs.

The fae leader turned back to them as he was handed a clipboard from his lackeys. In a bored tone, he said, “The realm won’t accept any envoys and nobody can pass through their wards.”

Phoenix laughed a little. “Why are you guys trying so hard to?”

“It’s a part of our peace accord,” one of the fae snapped. Another muttered something about ignorant outsiders asking stupid questions, and Jack could feel Phoenix take in a breath to verbally devastate the faerie.

But then a clipboard was tossed to Jack. The frost spirit barely caught it before it fell onto the muddy grass. He took a second to contemplate actually dropping it in the mud just to piss the fae off, but then the faerie was asking, “Do you know where we can find any of these individuals? Particularly the ones you associated with,” and Jack’s brain suddenly went numb.

The names of…associated…

Phoenix snatched the clipboard out of his hand before Jack could actually drop it.

Like a gaze unable to stop wandering to a burning train wreck, his eyes travelled down, over Phoenix’s arms and to the silver-stained paper the fire spirit looked like he wanted to burn a hole through. In the centre of a very short list of names, he saw six familiar people – himself, four people he once considered family, and a monster.

He looked away immediately and felt his hands start to tremble.

Phoenix cursed and threw the clipboard back at the damn fae. “No. We never stayed in contact.”

When consulted, the guy with the sword jerked his head toward Phoenix. The fae leader turned to Phoenix and Jack could hear the most disgusting leer in his voice as he spoke. “My source says you aren’t telling the whole truth there.”

Phoenix stiffened, blazing eyes flashing at the sword-carrying fae. Jack felt angry heat curl off his skin and almost had to step away from the fire spirit lest he get burnt. “We don’t know where any of the _living_ ones are,” Phoenix snarled. “Does that answer your fucking question better?”

When the sword guy relented with a little nod, the fae leader huffed. “Fine. But we’re taking the frost spirit with us.”

Jack’s heart lurched. He fell back a step behind Phoenix at the same moment the fire spirit advanced on the faeries a pace. “ _What_?” they both demanded, Phoenix with a hell of a lot of rage and Jack with equivalent levels of fear.

The fae started to shuffle about, preparing themselves to leave. “The Winter King won’t let us pass into his realm despite our warrants. You are Winter. He will let us in if we have you.”

A beat of silence went by before Phoenix, forever inconsiderate of the seriousness of a situation, began to laugh. Jack would have found himself snickering along with the idiot if not for the fact that it was _his_ _ass_ on the line here.

Giving the hysterical Phoenix a wide birth, a pair of faeries made to move toward Jack. Phoenix’s head snapped up the second they got within punching distance of him and he growled at them in warning. “I will boil the blood in your aristocratic veins if you try and touch him.”

The too-silver sword was unsheathed, branded, but the leader held up a hand to prevent any heads from rolling just yet. “We are taking Jack Frost with or without –”

“It won’t do you any good,” Jack interrupted, and suddenly all eyes except for the pair Phoenix had trained on the faeries were on him. “You think Boreas will let you in because you’re with me? Out of everything in this world, living or dead, he hates _me_ the most.”

Phoenix nodded. “Tried to have Frost killed the last time we popped by for a visit.”

Jack waved toward the fire spirit in agreement. “If you bring me with you, you will have zero chances of even getting an audience with the doorman. Try hiding behind another seasonal dignitary.”

“And not me,” Phoenix clarified. “I’m a close second on his shitlist.”

Jack couldn’t help but snort. “A _close_ second? He doesn’t consider you important enough to hate.”

“True. What an asshole.”

Like a proper band of ignorant goons, the fae looked to their leader for further instructions. Jack’s stomach dropped when the pack master simply waved his clipboard in Jack’s direction. The fae recommenced their advance, and Jack pointed his staff at the pair headed for him. “So help me I will skewer you and those creepy costumes,” he threatened.

The crows scattered around the lawn began to kick up a fuss, reminding Jack that he’d have at least some witnesses to whatever was going to happen to him here. Flames curled in Phoenix’s palms, and he backed up with Jack, holding a burning finger out to the advancing cloaks in warning.

There was a chuckle, one that made Jack want to punch the fae leader in the throat, and a sneering, “If the other Guardians knew you were saying such damnable things, Jack Frost, they would surely weep.” He gestured toward the sword-wielding fae. The silver sword flashed once, right in Jack’s eyes, and the warrior started toward Jack. “And since you still have access to the Winter King’s powers, I don’t believe your little story. You’re coming with us whether you like it or not.”

“Is it bad that I don’t know if I’m more terrified of messing up Yves’s lawn or getting murdered by these guys?” Phoenix mumbled.

Jack choked on a chuckle as he backed up another step. “Honestly the two fears are about neck and neck for me too.”

It was a lie. He’d take being ceremonially flayed by Yves over being thrown at the feet of Boreas any day. And by the tension cracking through the fire spirit, Phoenix’s bravado was just as false. But the attempt at humour managed to made Jack feel a little less ill at least, and he settled himself into a stance worthy of the fight they were about to enter into.

Fire swirled like a shield in front of them, and the fae leader thought to point out, “It should be mentioned that any attack against us is considered treason.” Another piece of paper was waved above his head, one with a very official looking seal stamped to the bottom of it. “Court orders.”

The spirits went very still. Phoenix’s flames stuttered, just once, in hesitation. But it was just long enough for the sword-carrying freak to reach through the fire, surprising the fuck out of Phoenix and Jack, and grab the fire spirit by the back of the neck. Phoenix’s face smashed into the faerie’s raised knee, and Jack yelled in shock as the spirit was promptly thrown at the feet of the other two faeries.

Jack pointed his staff at the faerie stomping toward him, but his hands were shaking. Fae treason was essentially a death sentence coupled with crippling humiliation. On the other hand, while being wrapped up and delivered to Boreas promised an end to whatever bright future Jack might have had ahead of him, at least Jack wouldn’t be left to rot in a dark cell for literally ever.

"This is fucking bleak," he muttered.

_Do I have to point out the irony in your stupid logic?_

A sudden chill scattered through Jack, and his grip on his staff tightened, his resolve picking itself out of its pessimistic pit and changing directions in a snap.

“I won't go,” he growled, low and cold, as winter began to flow into his palms and the swordsman squared up with him.

Off to his right two faeries manhandled Phoenix into a kneeling position and the fire spirit spat onto the lawn. With a violent fire in his eyes, he snarled, “If we don’t leave any of you alive to tell, then no one’s gonna know.”

“The benefactors of your power will,” the leader answered easily. “And I don’t think Boreas or the Summer Court will put up much of a fight to keep either of you safe from our laws.”

A cold (not by Jack’s standards, but unnaturally cool nonetheless) hand grabbed Jack’s arm. The frost spirit yanked himself out of the swordsman’s grip and snapped, “Don’t touch me.” Then to the leader he yelled, “If you know how little he thinks of me then why are you being so persistent?”

The leader shrugged, the gesture anything but casual. “Maybe we want to question you a bit more. You made our lie detector pause and I don’t like that.”

Phoenix swore at the faeries, cursing them with words that hurt even Jack’s ears to hear, and the swordsman held his weapon up to Jack threateningly.

But the spirit didn’t relent, not with the promise of an illogical interrogation and a dark, claustrophobic cell waiting for him if he surrendered. “I’m not going anywhere with you,” he snarled coldly, enough venom his words to make the swordsman hesitate.

But the hesitation lasted barely a second. Before Jack even had time to blink, the faerie swung and the hilt of the silver sword connected with Jack’s mouth in a burst of pain and splitting skin.

Jack spun from the impact, swearing as blood filled his mouth, and he hit the ground on his hands and knees before he could regain his balance.

A violent whoosh sounded from Jack’s left, and clutching at the blood dripping from his face he looked over and saw fire explode from Phoenix’s skin and the faeries stumble away from him.

This was going to end so fucking badly.

But before Jack could get hauled to his feet or Phoenix could get his throat cut for trying to burn the fae to a crisp, a dangerous, reverberating growl rolled over their standoff. Jack and Phoenix and any faerie with common sense whirled in time to see a giant black wolf walking down the porch steps and toward them.

A giant black wolf with three legs.

Jack heard Phoenix breathe, “ _Skreek_ ,” as the massive wolf rolled its shoulders and growled at every living thing on the lawn. Some faeries gasped, others fell on their asses in flat-out fright. But Jack was more concerned about what was happening behind the approaching form of wolfed-out Skreek.

Because Yves’s porch had suddenly become the most terrifying place on earth.

Yves and Pitch were standing either side of the rotten wooden porch, evaluating the battlefield with two pairs of narrowed eyes that promised pain to all they beheld. Blood plinked onto Jack’s hand and he met Pitch’s gold-riddled gaze before the Nightmare King cast it back out to the faeries. His arms were crossed strongly over his chest as he leaned against a warped pillar, and darkness, so much darkness, was curling off his clothes and crawling out from the corners of the house. The shadows didn’t have much substance to them, but they were there and posed a threatening picture when snaking around their king.

Yves, meanwhile, had his elbows and arms resting on the banister, crows perched on his hunched shoulders with too-dark eyes trained on the faeries. Yves’s own eyes were burning, and when he tilted his head up faux moonlight passed over his face and the resulting shadows made him look like he was smiling a face-splitting Halloween grin. But his lips hadn’t moved from the hard line he’d pressed them into. And the house he was resting on was starting to rattle with his _very_ unamused anger.

“Pitch,” the owner of the realm said in a loud, rough voice, “I do not know about you, but I most definitely have no benefactor looking over my shoulder.”

The Nightmare King let the strongest of his shadows roll off the porch and onto the ground, where they began to slither through the grass like worms after a hard rain. “Neither do I.”

Only then did Yves begin to smile, and honestly the sight was utterly terrifying. “I suppose that means if we were to slaughter these little faeries we would have no one to tattle on us.”

“It’s against the laws!” one of the faeries shouted, voice audibly quivering.

Yves cackled, and for a few chilling moments his crows joined in on the laugh. The sound echoed throughout the front yard, bouncing off invisible obstacles and returning until the laughter surrounded them from all angles. “If you were as educated about your laws as you presume to be, you would have known where your precious Fae Empire ends.” He pushed off the banister and stood tall, opening up his arms and inviting another few crows to perch on his limbs. “Your accords do not give you authority over the domains of the death gods.” The sky began to swirl a more prominent, ominous hue of purple that stained the realm in shades of midnight. “Oh my, and look where you are.”

The fae leader cursed and barked an order at his henchmen. But when the faeries tried their glittery little teleportation trick, the crimson refused to consume the lot of them. When they all turned back to Yves on the porch, the man’s grin was even more fearsome.

Skreek began to growl, with intent this time, and the sound was echoed a dozen times over. Jack tore his eyes away from the scene on the porch to see that a collection of wolves had joined the party from either side of the house and were stalking around the perimeter of the lawn amongst the crows.

The faeries around Phoenix abandoned their post with a cry, but the swordsman wasn’t going to be so easily deterred from his damn mission. Before Jack could turn around and beat him off with his staff, the faerie grabbed him and suddenly there was a very sharp sword resting a hair’s breadth from Jack’s throat.

“Drop your staff before I cut out your lying tongue,” came the low order right in Jack’s ear.

Jack’s fingers gripped his staff tighter and the flat side of the blade brushed against his Adam’s apple. “I wasn’t lying!” he exclaimed, forced to swallow down the remaining blood in his mouth just to defend himself.

“ _Drop it_.”

_Don’t even think about it._

Jack went rigid at the sound of his thoughts piping up. He hadn’t even remotely been about to drop the staff – why the fuck would he? If the swordsman tried to cut him, Jack would probably be able to freeze him a heartbeat faster and hell would rain down on him and his comrades. There’d be blood and carnage and the fae realm would never know what happened to that inquest squad they sent out to the Halloween King’s realm.

Then his heartbeat began to pick up. Everything his thoughts told him to do, they were for their own gain, weren’t they? The thoughts weren’t shy about pointing out how much they loathed everyone currently defending Jack, so is that what they wanted? A fight? Did they know something Jack was too blinded by his own proximity to see? If he didn’t let go of the staff would Phoenix and Yves and Skreek and Pitch all get hurt?

His breath rasped and before his thoughts could interject, he opened his palms and let his staff clatter to the footpath

Jack looked up and saw that the wolves had stopped their circling, but were still snarling and snapping.

“Let us out of this realm,” the leader demanded, ushering Jack and the swordsman toward the mass of faeries.

Jack felt a knee hit the back of his legs, the metal pressed against the underside of his jaw as he was forced forward.

Rain began to trickle from the sky again, and Jack felt a droplet hit his face before he heard a familiar sizzle. His eyes travelled over and he saw Phoenix being held back by a wolf hanging onto his singlet, the flames licking over his skin slowly extinguishing in the rain.

He looked pissed, but Jack knew Yves was making a good decision. The Summer Court most definitely would not shield Phoenix if he intentionally broke fae laws and Jack didn’t think anyone here had enough man power to take down the entire Court to break Phoenix out of jail.

_Have fun rotting in darkness._

But intimidation wasn’t all Yves had going for him, and before his thoughts’ promise could evoke proper fear in the frost spirit, the ground beneath his feet trembled violently. The swordsman grabbed him on reflex, and Jack watched in borderline horror as vines burst forth from the soil with a deafening groan and wrapped spindly limbs around the unsuspecting faeries. The pushy swordsman went utterly tense behind Jack, his breath turning short and sharp with surprise, and Jack realised that the guy was literally rooted to the ground.

“Frost, _move_ ,” Phoenix shouted as the faeries began screaming at each other in panic. “It’s just a blade you can heal from it.”

_Just a…? WHAT?!_ “I can’t heal from being decapitated, you moron!”

“They’re not going to kill you if they need your help. You can handle a scratch.”

The faeries’ leader, although lifted two feet off the ground by a boa constrictor of a pumpkin vine, managed to haughtily comment, “Not if it’s poisoned. Right Skreeklavic?”

Everyone at the assembly suddenly went very quiet, and Jack had to wonder, for the flash of a moment, whether this faerie _wanted_ to be murdered. Or maybe he was just trying to get the wolves’ attention off the majority of the group while they tried to escape?

But _really_ , throwing your own sword-wielding manic under the bus like that?

The swordsman twitched in the vine’s hold and Jack felt him turn his attention over to the wolf who had grown very still on the footpath. In that moment of precarious silence, Jack’s instincts – his _blessed_ instincts – told him to move his ass.

And move was _exactly_ what he did.

Jack smashed his head back into his captor’s mask, stunning him, and peeled, with a force that hurt to exert, the guy’s muscle-bound wrist away from his throat. The sword tilted, moved out of slicing range, and the faerie cursed at him as he was stuck paralysed with no way to fight against the vines.

Once clear of the sharp side of the sword, Jack slid down to the ground and scrambled for his staff. He didn’t even wait around to beat up the swordsman for knocking him around – Skreek’s beastly eyes were locked onto the faerie and all Jack wanted to do was get as far as possible out of the werewolf’s line of fire.

Phoenix shook off the hold a wolf had on him when he saw Jack break free and the two spirits dashed out of the gauntlet, keeping a suitably enormous distance between themselves and Skreek before scrambling up the porch steps.

Jack fell back against the front door and heaved a semi-relieved breath.

As the wolves began to take up a pack killing formation (Jack had known Skreek long enough to have witnessed some of his moves, and recognise this one as a particularly gory tactic), Skreek closed in on the immobilized swordsman. The werewolf overlord looked about ready to tear the guy to pieces, but if he’d had Pitch’s eyes he’d probably be able to see the wariness in Skreek’s stance, the way wolfish eyes spent more time caught on the silver sword than the swordsman himself.

Jack got to his feet and stepped up to the edge of the porch, searching the battlefield in case this was the moment he’d be called to do as he promised and help Skreek prevent that sword from touching flesh ever again.

A hand grabbed the back of his hoodie, and when Jack looked up at Pitch, the Nightmare King shook his head. “Wait,” he muttered with a terse expression.

Phoenix, hanging on the porch steps next to Jack, opened his mouth to undoubtedly say something appalling to Pitch.

But before breath and ash could leave Phoenix’s mouth, the sound of dozens of vines tearing caused the wolves to grow deathly silent. Jack’s breath hitched in horror and the wolves leapt back as a silver sword sliced through the stretched plant matter and smaller daggers wielded by other faeries hacked and chopped. Glittering magic was dispelled through the air to repel the wolves and crows, and all the beasts on the lawn became violently restless.

Yves made a displeased noise and Jack shucked off Pitch’s grip. The faeries were milling, gathering in some sort of defensive cluster as the swordsman squared up with Skreek. Smoke and then burning reached Jack’s nose, and out of the corner of his eye he saw fire roll up Phoenix’s bare arms.

“You will not be in need of those flames, Phoenix,” Yves said without taking his eyes off Skreek.

“You sure about that? Because your pumpkin tentacles ain’t –”

“Shut him up _please_ ,” Jack heard Pitch breathe. Startled, Jack looked up at the Nightmare King, then out at the battle scene Pitch was suddenly so focused on.

He blinked when he saw how incredibly still the fae had grown.

Phoenix, by some miracle, abandoned his rant in favour of raking his gaze over the faeries suspiciously. “Are they playing dead or something?”

It was then that Jack remembered the darkness squirming through the blades of grass, curling and wiggling and slithering. Those tendrils of shadows must have reached the fae while they’d been preoccupied by the vines, and as much as Pitch’s tactic made Jack panic on levels he wholly did not want to explore, he was relieved that the faeries been rendered mostly-immobile once again.

The silver sword – wielded shakily as the swordsman’s attention snapped between the growling Skreek and his own shadowy chains – couldn’t even pierce through the darkness. Jack looked back at Pitch and saw the tense lines of concentration tearing across his face, no doubt in the effort to find a nice balance between exerting energy and feeding off fear so he wouldn’t faint in front of Yves.

_This king’s ego is really something else_ , Jack thought with a little roll of his eyes.

“Creepy shit,” Phoenix mumbled. Pitch’s brow twitched in annoyance, and Jack sent Phoenix a dark look. The fire spirit snapped his teeth at him in reply and said, “Go inside and fix your fucking face.”

Jack glared at the spirit. When he touched his split lip and realised how much blood had collected on his mouth, he grumpily retorted, “How about yours? You got hit pretty hard.”

“I’m made of tougher stuff than you, princess.”

“Is that why there’s blood dripping out of your nose?”

“ _What_? Oh, _ugh_ , I didn’t even –”

On Jack’s left, Pitch went absolutely rigid. The frost spirit’s concern spiked when he saw the tension pouring through Pitch’s jaw and down the side of his neck. His eyes were flooded with gold and Jack’s gaze locked onto the way his entire body was leaning too heavily against the splintering porch post.

“Pitch,” he whispered, worried.

The Nightmare King’s spine straightened somewhat before a curse fell from his lips and the precious concentration he’d tenuously been able to manage faltered. Jack’s eyes snapped down to the faeries as their leader poked his way through the fear. The swordsman leapt back and swung at a few wolves that had gotten too close to him, Skreek included, and the resounding growl of the wolves was menacing enough to make even Jack shiver.

“That swordsman’s a deadman,” Phoenix grunted angrily.

But before Phoenix could stomp down the steps, and before Jack could tear his concentration between the weakened Pitch and his promise to Skreek, the faerie leader held up a small object and yelled, “You know what this is, don’t you, Yves Saint Hallow?”

All of the crows and a few of the wolves froze, while the rest, apparently unruffled by whatever the faerie was waving around, snapped at the barrier of magic the fae had dispersed to defend their trembling little cluster. A pair collapsed under the onslaught of whatever Pitch was still managing to do to them, but the swordsman’s swift intervention saved them from being eaten. Unfortunately.

Yves swore in earnest, and Jack squinted through the darkness. He could barely make out what the faerie leader was holding in his trembling hand, but if his eyes weren’t lying to him, it looked suspiciously like a bundle of bones tied together with string.

A couple of faeries cried relieved comments, but the words quickly descended into pathetic sobbing with a simple flicker of Pitch’s eyes. Pitch’s long fingers meanwhile rose to massage his chest, and Jack just itched to smack the Nightmare King down with his staff so he wouldn’t red-line his powers any longer.

_Do it. Show him how much you care, how concerned you are. I dare you._

Jack nearly snorted. Yeah, and have Pitch throttle him for stepping on his ego in front of Yves, Skreek, _and_ the Imperials? No way in hell.

“Let us out,” the faerie demanded, voice cracking.

To everyone’s bleak surprise, Yves snarled, “ _Fine_.”

Skreek whirled on Yves, but Yves didn’t so much as look at the wolf as he lowered the apparently impermeable defences of his realm’s wards.

As red flecks of light began to shimmer around the fae, and still-rattled faeries began to pick up their convulsing brethren from the muddy grass, the leader called, “We’ll find you again when we need to. That includes you, Pitch Black. And we’ll make the experience even less pleasant than yesterday.”

The swordsman raised his sword and pointed the damned thing straight toward Jack and Phoenix before the fae were whisked away by their magical dust.

There was barely enough time for a heartbeat to pass – just enough time, apparently, for a werewolf overlord to figure out that his oh so loathed prey had just been allowed to escape – before a dark, angry growl ruptured the amethyst-hued air.

Blue eyes flickered down to the wolf snarling up at the owner of the realm, then over to the humanized Halloween King staring with dead eyes down at the rage-drenched beast.

But Jack was numb to whatever alarm he was meant to be experiencing in a situation like this. He heard Phoenix start to curse, saw shadows curl and shift and retreat across the porch, but he felt nothing but static pinch and crackle through his body.

“Move, Jack.”

Jack flinched and instinctively jerked away from the voice. It took one glance at the man standing beside him for Jack’s numb shock to turn over into a clear-cut accusation, and in that same exchange, Pitch’s entire face shut down.

_“That includes you, Pitch Black. And we’ll make the experience even less friendly than yesterday.”_

“Hah,” Jack breathed, tearing his eyes away from the king. “Ha. Oh my god.”

Pitch had talked to the faeries. He’d seen them so recently, and they’d probably asked him questions just like they’d asked North. Questions about Jack, about where they could find him.

There was a pain forming somewhere in his chest and it grabbed hold of him, preventing Jack from letting his eyes wander back to the Nightmare King. And the worst part was that it had begun before his thoughts had even offered him a reason for it.

_Guess we know now how they found you here_ , they finally murmured. The tone was so _casual_ , but Jack could hear the sneer in the words, could see the smug grin flash at him.

In a lower, sharper tone, Pitch bit out, “Unless you feel like getting eaten by wolves, _move_.”

But Jack ignored his warning, no matter how much goodwill it may or may not have contained. The Nightmare King sighed, sounding tired and annoyed, and stalked inside alone.

Jack could feel Phoenix’s eyes on him until Yves muscled between the two spirits, one hand on each of their shoulders, and forced them behind him. “Listen to Pitch and get inside,” Yves snapped.

“You’re kidding right?” Phoenix said, indignant.

But Yves was far from joking, and the fact that he went right ahead and descended the porch steps toward the waiting circle of growling werewolves all but proved that the man was absolutely insane.

“Get in the house and shut the door,” Yves called back as he began rolling up his shirtsleeves, his suit jacket neatly discarded on the porch banister.

Jack instantly took a step after Yves, a single step that was halted by a hot arm banded over his chest. “What, Phoenix?” The fire spirit started pulling him into the house as he muttered low curses. “Wait, no. Are you seriously listening to Yves? Stop! We have to –”

Yves stepped up to a furiously growling Skreek without so much as a lick of emotion on his face. Panic grabbed at Jack’s throat when he realised what was about to happen, and he struggled against the fire spirit. “YVES!” he screamed.

Wolves began to circle around Yves like sharks, and Jack balked as the suited man simply dropped into a crouch and yelled, “GET INSIDE!”

Jack’s legs were kicked out from underneath him, and he fell through the front door and onto his back in the entranceway.

Phoenix slammed the front door shut and Jack scrambled off the floor and grabbed at the fire spirit. Their skin hissed and burnt wherever he made contact, but he could handle this much if it was for the sake of shaking some sense into the guy. “What the hell are you doing? We have to help Yves!”

Phoenix shoved him back onto the floor and held a finger up to his face to warn him to stay down. “He’s got this, Frost.”

“Phoenix!”

“I doubt this is his first rodeo with wolfed-out Skreek,” he said, voice firm despite the fact that the bastard flinched when a particularly nasty growl came from outside. He shook his head and levelled Jack with a serious look. “Besides, are you forgetting who we’re talking about here? It’s _Yves_. Have some faith in him.”

_Have some…?_ Jack gaped at him in outrage. This wasn’t about faith! This was about helping Yves fight off a pack of wolves who were only attacking him because Skreek was in a rage and _oh god_ , what was going to happen when they all came back to their senses and Yves was _dead_?!

A symphony of terrifying roars tore through the house, followed by growling and ripping and Jack felt a sickening sense of terror claw at the back of his eyes. Grabbing his staff, he warned, “I’m not cleaning his body off the lawn when Skreek tears him apart,” before turning and stalking off into the kitchen.

 


	16. A Tiny Beacon of Trouble

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the Saint Hallow household deals with the aftermath of the Imperials' visit with grace and dignity, and the Nightmare King feels what it's like to be in the shoes Jack most definitely does not wear.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Part II of the update (head back to chapter 15 for part I)

_Skreek is going to kill Yves…Pitch probably turned me into the fae…Boreas is picking fights with psychopaths…I almost got sliced by a poisoned sword…_

_Ah, a good start to the day_ , his thoughts sighed.

When he realised his hands were shaking, Jack clenched them tight and forced himself to get out of his head and do something about the blood that was still dripping down his chin. Although he hadn’t been hit by the poisoned part of the sword (he figured, at least, since his face wasn’t burning off or anything) the wound was deep enough to just _keep bleeding_ apparently and it was starting to get annoying.

Setting his staff against the cabinets, he ran some cold water and rinsed out his mouth and cleaned his face. Washing the wound stung like a bitch, but obscenely enough the pain dulled as soon as a shadow passed behind him, and of Jack’s attention involuntarily switched from his own agony to the man rifling through cupboards on the other side of the room.

But he didn’t turn around. Didn’t ask what Pitch was looking for. Jack figured that he might just burst into hysterical, tearful laughter if he had to look at the guy right now and he didn’t want to have to put that on the list of shit his thoughts considered a good way to start the morning.

Without saying anything, Pitch shut a cupboard and closed in on Jack. The frost spirit was forcibly moved aside by the guy’s presence, and Jack watched in mild surprise as Pitch soaked a dark tea towel in the running water before shutting the stream off.

“Freeze this and hold it to the cut,” he said, and offered Jack the wet towel like giving medical aid was just a regular nice-guy thing he did on a daily basis.

Jack didn’t take the towel immediately, figuring his fingers were doing a good enough job of effectively icing the cut. But then blood began to trickle through his cold digits, running in rivulets over his knuckles and into the sink, and he relented without so much as a thank you because screw Pitch and his hot and cold moods.

Just screw Pitch in general.

“Are you going to ask me?”

Jack nearly laughed. Nearly. The moisture in the towel froze over in his grasp and he used the solid ice to muffle any out-of-place displays of amusement he might’ve let slip. Because Jack most definitely found nothing funny about any of the emotions he was feeling right now, and he didn’t want to stow away all his secret problems from Phoenix only for everyone to think he was crazy anyway.

Out of the corner of his eye, Jack saw Pitch leaning back against the kitchen counter, his body facing the opposite direction to Jack’s as he watched the frost spirit ice his wound. He looked nearly as drained as he had last night, and something inside Jack felt like telling Pitch off for wasting whatever precious strength he might have regained from his nap. Instead, though, his eyes fell back to the droplets of blood in the sink and he muttered, “Ask what?”

As if he didn’t already know.

As if there was a living chance in hell that Pitch just might use his delay to run away without delving into another unpleasantly confrontational cutscene.

“If I turned you in.”

Jack silently groaned. Why couldn’t this guy just leave his emotions alone for five seconds so they could _settle_ and Jack could properly _deal with them_. “I don’t care,” he lied.

The reply that came after a short, evaluating pause was a low, “Then why do you look so hurt?”

A blast of anger shot straight through Jack, and furiously cold eyes snapped to the Nightmare King. The low fucking blow Pitch thought he was at liberty to hit Jack with spread an awful pain right through his stomach. As always, though, Pitch’s face was impassive, stone-hard and unreadable while his stupid eyes danced with a reflection of Jack’s fears, taunting him with the same hue of gold that he’d been forced to throw up last night.

Pitch was right, Jack _was_ hurt. But he wasn’t about to get walked over just because of the fact.

Throwing the towel and ice into the sink, Jack spread a hand on the counter and stared up at the king. “Why don’t you stop pretending to know what feelings are and come over here and do what you _really_ want to do to me.”

Pitch downright glared at Jack for a long moment, anger finally finding its way into his expression. But that didn’t stop him from moving forward, and wasn’t it just hypocritical and _pathetic_ that Jack felt like crying when Pitch gravitated closer to him.

But this was what he had asked for, wasn’t it? He’d told Skreek from the bottom of his heart that he didn’t want to be used for this kind of thing, and what had he gone and done? Practically invited Pitch with a terrible kiss to do anything he wanted.

And he couldn’t even really blame Pitch. He hadn’t told the man that last night was the first time he’d ever been kissed. That being kissed meant more to him than getting fucked on any available flat surface.

So how could he know? How could he know how painful the thought of Pitch tossing him away so easily was? The trickling of irrational betrayal that was slowly filling his heart with bitterness. The sad, resigned realisation that his thoughts were right after all.

_Told you._

Jack’s eyes fell from Pitch’s face, his anger waning and being replaced by a stinging pain that was as physical as it was emotional. With a tongue that felt thick, he mumbled, “Just because you have a piece of pretty trash throwing itself at you doesn’t give you the right –”

But Pitch had had enough of letting Jack talk. The frost spirit flinched when a large, warm hand clamped over his mouth. He winced when the palm pressed against his new wound, and looked up to see furious confusion and frustration flood into Pitch’s face.

“I didn’t tell them about you,” Pitch ground out, the small space of distance he’d closed between them apparently solely for the purpose of intimidating Jack into believing him.

Jack nudged Pitch’s hand away with his nose and muttered, “You don’t have to lie. At some point everyone reaches a limit with their generosity. I get it.”

“Well I haven’t yet,” Pitch growled, and the pain in Jack’s stomach turned sharp with surprise and anxious hope. “Because of you I had to hedge with some reasonable response about you being a homeless customer and that your fire spirit was employed as a labourer for a gang boss who was no longer at his permanent residence and I was _mad_ that you had put me in such a difficult situation.”

Jack stared at Pitch in astonishment. The Nightmare King’s brow was twitching, as if he was trying so hard not to relive his frustration but the shit was just creeping back over him anyway.

He’d…he’d gone that far for Jack? Even after the fight they’d had? A glimmer of a memory, of Pitch’s set and determined and accusatory expression greeting Jack outside the home he’d found Lani in, ghosted through his mind. “Is that what you wanted to talk to me about yesterday?” Jack asked weakly.

“It was going to be more of an argument than anything else,” he admitted, “but yes.”

_Are you stupid enough to think he’s telling the truth?_

A trickle of doubt, of distrust and sadness, plinked into Jack’s stomach, and the frost spirit felt his breath stutter in panic. No, this couldn’t be happening again. He _believed_ Pitch. The irritation on his face alone was genuine enough to make Jack trust his words. Why did his thoughts have to barge in now of all damn times –

_He’s lying because he knows he won’t be able to get between your legs if he doesn’t._

– with lines like _that_?! Shit, he couldn’t deal with this. His heart was clenching, but even it was confused as to why –

_Wouldn’t be the first time that happened, right, Jack?_

An icy bolt shot straight down Jack’s spine, and he spun from Pitch. He could feel the Nightmare King’s glowing eyes settle on the back of his neck, but he didn’t dare turn around lest his face reveal what kind of twisted shit his thoughts had managed to come up with.

“– didn’t see the idol they had!”

Jack jolted at the sound of Skreek’s – very human – voice. There was clunking and clicking, almost like the werewolf was refastening his prosthetic leg, and a pleading, “Yves, I’m _sorry_ ,” before the owner of the realm blew into the kitchen.

In, remarkably, one entire piece. Jack stared at him in (pleased) shock, taking note that the only damaged that seemed to be done to the man was a thin tear on his pant leg that hadn’t even gone deep enough to draw blood.

And then Skreek came hobbling into the kitchen, and Jack realised exactly how much of Phoenix’s “faith” he should have had in Yves’s fighting abilities. The werewolf was an absolute mess – mud marks streaked his skin and bruises were blooming in several key areas, as well as slashes of cuts neat enough to have been made by knives. His barely-buttoned pyjama shirt revealed the majority of his wounds, and when Jack realised that he was staring a little too intently at Skreek’s skin, he looked pointedly away from the wolf.

“You and I are going to have this talk once you have taken me to the fae realm to get a new suit,” Yves informed Skreek.

Nodding his assent happily, Skreek finally noticed Jack and Pitch loitering by the sink and made a loud beeline for the frost spirit. “Jack! Your pretty face!”

Jack quickly held up his hands to defend himself. “I’m okay, Skreek. It’s even stopped bleeding.”

Skreek made an expression that said he would have spat dramatically onto the floor if he wasn’t positive that Yves would skin him alive for such a gross gesture. “Next time I see the bastard I’ll kill him twice. Once for my leg, and then for your diminished beauty.”

“Hey!”

“What about _my_ face?” Phoenix exclaimed from where he stood behind Skreek. “I think he broke my nose.”

The fire spirit was so stupidly unaware of himself sometimes. It probably didn’t help that his body occasionally automatically cauterised wounds closed so Phoenix didn’t even notice they’d opened in the first place, but his body didn’t cauterise _pain_. Surely he would have had to notice _that_. “Trust you to only realise that now,” Jack said, earning a half-baked sneer from the spirit.

Skreek simply peered over his shoulder and down his nose at Phoenix. “You can’t lose what you don’t have, brat.”

Phoenix spluttered, and Yves looked over everyone in mild judgement. “If you are all quite finished with your chatter, I have something I wish to say. And it requires Phoenix and Jack to _sit down_.”

The two spirits met each other’s eyes and Jack could feel Phoenix’s empathetic, _Oh shit_ , just as the same sentiment came bubbling to the forefront of Jack’s mind.

Skreek’s eyebrows hiked, like he was making fun of them for being in trouble, and Yves proceeded to stomp his way across the kitchen and into the sitting room on the other side of the house.

Phoenix began muttering to himself as he followed after Yves. Jack was barely able to catch, “…fucking faeries fucking interfering, gonna turn me into a single parent without a home…” before the fire spirit was out of his sight, Skreek as well.

Dread knotting in a tight ball in his stomach, Jack turned to take his staff off the counter and froze when he saw how intensely Pitch was glaring at him.

Crap. It might be a good idea if they got kicked out after all.

With the efficiency of a coward, Jack snatched his staff off the countertop and hurried after the others before Pitch could try and engage in another round of verbal warfare with him. He didn’t think he could handle it at the moment – not until he tried to settle whatever subconscious shit was causing him to turn every genuine gesture of Pitch’s into something malicious.

_That’s if anything he’s ever done is genuine._

“Stop talking,” Jack muttered as he took up a seat on the back of Yves’s leather lounge, right next to Phoenix who seemed to be in the process of trying to sink into the very seams of the pillows to avoid whatever was about to go down.

But luck, the whore, was never on their side.

Standing on the other side of the coffee table, Yves stared the two spirits down as Skreek took up a prime viewing position in a sofa chair between the two parties.

“Are you the ones they are looking for?” Yves demanded.

Jack had to look away from the man’s intimidating expression, and even Phoenix, who usually met angry demands with more anger, just sank deeper into the lounge and said, “If you want us to leave, we’ll leave.”

“I never said that,” Yves replied with a shake of his head. Jack let out a little relieved breath, and out of the corner of his eye saw the dark figure of Pitch grace the archway with his presence. Skreek noticed him as well and waved him over to join in on the drama, but he opted to hang back. Jack was as unsurprised as he was thankful.

“I am asking,” Yves continued, “because I want to know why I just ran a mob of Imperials off my lawn and if they are going to return with an army when they realise that you evaded their questions.”

“We didn’t evade anything,” Jack argued. “You told us not to lie and we didn’t. Although letting us know that there was a _lie_ _detector_ among them would have been nice as well.”

“And leave you boys with all the answers?” Skreek interjected with an attempt at humour. “Where’s the fun in that?”

“It still would have been nice,” Jack mumbled as he cast a glance down at Phoenix, who was staring intently at a patch of polished floorboard.

With a sigh, Yves said, “As a general rule, inquisitions like the one we just had the pleasure of witnessing have at least one lie-reading faerie among them. It is a dated practice though, and only ever works to catch out fools who do not know how to manipulate their words.”

_So of course Pitch would’ve had a great time with them,_ Jack thought distractedly.

“And evasion and lying are not the same, bony Jack.”

Jack looked back up at Yves and licked at the corner of his broken lip, causing the wound to sting, as Yves stated firmly, “I do not care what you two have done.” He waved an airy hand toward the other two villains in the room. “None of us do. But if those Imperials do return, then we would like some clue of what we should not be saying so we know how to deflect their questions.”

The frost spirit swallowed, and felt something a little warm tickle at his insides. He could count on a closed, tightly clenched fist the number of people who had ever offered to help him and Phoenix with their baggage train of a past.

But Yves didn’t know the real-estate he was trying to buy into. Wasn’t aware of just how crappy it was.

And nor did he seem to accept that Jack was telling the truth. Although he and Phoenix had been a part of some dubious situations, whatever had happened to the Holomire people had nothing to do with them. They’d been there, sure, but the state they’d left the forest in was exactly how they’d found it when they’d arrived – quiet, content, and full of asshole warlords.

“We didn’t do anything. Right, Phoenix?”

A second ticked by, and then an entire minute. By the time Jack realised the fire spirit had never answered him, all the eyes in the room had locked onto Phoenix and the warrior of fire looked about ready to implode.

“Phoenix!”

Phoenix twitched, and mumbled, “Yeah…right.”

Panic began niggling at Jack’s heart. Why was Phoenix acting like that?! He couldn’t be…they couldn’t have seriously had something to do with what the faeries had been talking about?

No. No way. Jack couldn’t remember a single thing about that day that could have resulted in the Holomire people shutting their borders. Not unless the meeting made them realise how annoying outsiders were and they’d finally decided to cut off from the outer world for good.

“They mentioned the Holomire realm,” Yves said, as if picking up on Jack’s thoughts. The frost spirit looked over and winced when he saw three sets of eyes evaluating Phoenix with hurtful levels of suspicion. “Although shutting their borders seems like something they would do regardless of any strife, the Imperials appear to believe that something terrible has happened to them.”

“You seem to know them,” Pitch mentioned in a flat tone.

Yves glanced at him once before returning his attention to the spirits. “Anyone who hates the Imperials is someone I am happy to have brunch with.”

“Amen to that,” Skreek agreed.

“So I assume they are on a hunt for whoever is at fault.”

Anger flared in Jack, and the spirit narrowed his eyes at whatever accusation Yves was trying to lay on them. “What the hell are you saying? We didn’t do anything to those people. We didn’t even see any part of the forest outside the shrine where they had the conference, remember Phoenix?”

The fire spirit didn’t so much as look at him, and Jack sank down onto the leather next to him. The heat Phoenix was radiating was so weak, and that alone was making the alarm bells ringing in Jack’s head reach even greater heights of anxiety.

In a gentler tone, Jack said, “It was so boring and all those lords just kept looking at us like we were insects in their soup. They laughed at me for wearing no shoes and their entourage of politicians tried to have us all kicked out. Remember?”

_“Jack! Help us, Jack.”_

Jack flinched back at sudden appearance of the memory, of the feel of leaves under his feet and children laughing. But…no, that memory wasn’t real. It was just a trick conjured by a pissed-off Io. Right?

Phoenix’s gaze flickered to Jack for the briefest second before it darted back toward the floor. “Can you give me a minute?” he mumbled.

It took a few moments for Jack to realise that Phoenix was asking _him_ the question. At once, hurt and anger entwined and snaked up Jack’s throat, almost choking him. Blindly grabbing his staff, he all but sprinted from the house before his panic could couple with his claustrophobia and have the walls move in on him and trap him there with that terrible expression of guilt on Phoenix’s face.

 

* * *

 

 Pitch was well accustomed to managing trouble in his life.

He was a master at handling the (ironic, but far from amusing) nightmares that plagued his sleep. He was unruffled by the unsettling atmosphere created by the Imperials’ arrival. He was even starting to get used to the chest pains and the _nausea_ that was beginning to accompany the agony every time he overused his powers.

What he was very clearly failing at dealing with, however, was the disruption the frost spirit caused with his very existence and the _curveball_ he’d thrown in Pitch’s face last night.

A point in case was the fact that, upsettingly, his boots had carried him out of the house in the wake of Jack’s departure without even consulting him first – without even _pausing_ to consider that just _maybe_ whatever the fire spirit was about to divulge might just be the tipping point and Pitch could finally return to his career in sales without any more hesitations.

It was as if it’d been decided, without Pitch’s input, that following the frost spirit was more important than searching for a reason to leave.

_“Just let me go if you’re not interested.”_

Pitch caught a nearby tree by a low-hanging branch and used it to brace himself.

He was doomed.

As soon as Jack had said those words to him, the very _idea_ of denying the frost spirit was smacked down with a ferocity that Pitch didn’t even know was possible in situations like that. Even now, he was still reeling from how strongly his hunger had surged. How instead of questioning the offer like he should have – like his sweet, devoted paranoia would have wanted of him – he’d accepted it with fervour.

He rubbed a weary hand over his face as his brain reminded him of how he'd been rewarded for his decision – the breathy noises that’d vibrated through Jack’s throat, the feel of cold breath on his collarbone while his fingers traced icy, uneven flesh.

But what his brain failed to point out was that Jack was also too closely connected to the whirlwind of chaos Pitch had inadvertently bought shares in just by associating with the damn spirit. He was too unpredictable, too confusing.

He gave Pitch a headache more often than not, and yet the Nightmare King hadn’t turn him down, hadn’t humiliate him, hadn’t done any of the things Jack was so terrified of last night.

_I am going to lose whatever credibility I might have as the Nightmare King and it’s going to be all his damn fault_ , Pitch thought with what he considered to be a healthy dose of cynicism.

Nevertheless, tired eyes still scanned through the trees ahead of him, searching past the violet dawn-light and evergreen leaves for something familiar. Eventually, he found it – a little bundle of fear and insecurity that honestly should not have become as discernible as it was. It rested beyond the line of green, probably off somewhere in the barracks, and Pitch decidedly headed in the opposite direction of it.

His boots might have concluded that Jack was more important than a vital, potentially-incriminating story, but that didn’t mean he had to follow through with their wishes. Moreover, he was fairly certain the argument they’d nearly had in the kitchen had yet to be resolved, and as much as Pitch was always prepared for a clash of wits, he found it more than disagreeable to receive the frost spirit’s cold shoulder and those callous words when he had truly tried to _help_ the idiot.

_Oh look, more irony,_ he thought dryly. _I suppose I deserve it at this point._

On the cobbled path up ahead, he spotted some newly-turned wolves being tended to by others still in their nightwear. Sitting on a windowsill, Xani was amongst the wolves who’d apparently been torn into by Yves (Pitch was beginning to think that his domestic habits were only the tip of a frighteningly ruthless iceberg), and she caught sight of him wandering as she dabbed at a bruise on the face of another wolf.

“You look terrible,” she said when he was in earshot.

Mildly offended, he gave the streaks of mud and grass, the bruises, and the very prominent set of scratches on the wolf’s face a pointed look. “So do you.”

Xani flashed her teeth in the briefest sneer before nodding her head toward the other side of the barracks. “Jack went that way.”

His gaze followed her directions and he muttered, “I know.”

“You gonna go get him?” she asked, and he was reminded of Skreeklavic on Halloween, sitting in the darkness and telling him not to hesitate if he wanted to go find Jack.

On that night, had the werewolf’s all-seeing eyes noticed the way Pitch’s gaze had followed Jack as he’d left the room? Could they have foreseen how Pitch kept managing to find his way to Jack’s side without even realising it, or the fact that the first thing Pitch had looked for when he’d walked outside was _Jack’s_ fear?

Forehead pinching, Pitch ran his fingers through the back of his hair, eyes set on the violet horizon as dawn inched its way into the sky. In reality, he’d probably been doomed even before Jack had kissed him. The second he’d agreed to stay on Halloween instead of roughing it for two nights with his Nightmares had sealed his fate, and every opportunity to leave that he’d failed to take just made it worse.

And now look where he was – agonizing over the resentment of a frost spirit, despite the fact that Pitch had been utterly unsurprised when Jack had jumped to his offensive (although not unwarranted) conclusions.

_“Why don’t you stop pretending to know what feelings are and come over here and do what you_ really _want to do to me.”_

His fingers dug into his scalp and his eyes narrowed. He knew Jack had said those words in anger, and anger he could usually handle with exceptional skill. But there had been so much barely-masked pain in his voice that Pitch had been overwhelmed with the need to just _shake_ the spirit until he lost all that jagged ice in his eyes. Or at least make him shut up and _listen_ to Pitch.

“He looked upset,” Xani added.

_You’re telling me._ He sighed, eyes flicking down to the wolf she was tending (who seemed to be falling asleep as Xani wiped at his wounds).

“Are you going do something about it?” she asked, and there was a glint in her eyes that Pitch didn’t like the look of.

Then his brain decided to offer him the image of Jack’s expression as he’d told him the creative lengths he’d gone to to defend the spirit’s location. The surprise and then the shred of happiness that had appeared before it’d crumped and Jack had given Pitch his back in one of the most infuriating displays of rejection Pitch had ever been witness to.

“Fuck,” he muttered, defeated, and the sound of Xani’s laughter was left in his wake as he stomped off toward Jack’s fear.

 

The frost spirit was hiding in what was one of the largest stables Pitch had beheld in his life. Made of the same dark wood and stone as the rest of the barracks, the structure was enormous in both quantity of stalls and the size of each pen. “Large enough for warhorses,” Pitch murmured as he sized up an empty stall, nostalgia pinching at his already disturbed sentiments.

The muffled sound of Jack’s voice caught Pitch’s attention, and he traversed the stable floor in his usual silence. When the frost spirit’s voice grew a little clearer, Pitch ducked sideways into a thin hallway before emerging into another section of the stables – a smaller room with a dozen or so pens and empty shelves lining a wall. A huge sliding door was cracked open, and the incoming light illuminated a strip of the frost spirit lying face down on one of the mid-level shelves.

He was mumbling to himself, Pitch realised after a moment of staring at him. Speaking harsh little barely-intelligible words to himself, punctuated every now and then with a tense shift of his shoulders.

“Am I interrupting?” Pitch asked, half serious.

He watched as Jack’s head snapped up and icy eyes landed on his face. A couple of seconds passed, wherein the two stared at each other and Pitch wondered if Jack would take the chance to just walk right out the door and ignore him.

But then the spirit winced, and, returning his chin to his arms, mumbled, “No.”

_A positive start_ , he thought wryly as he dug his hands into his pockets. Large crates sat in stacks of threes around the room, creating a maze that Pitch stepped into once it was clear that Jack wasn’t going to try and freeze him for bothering his quiet time. Shoving one aside with the toe of his boot, he read a label written in a very, very old language and realised that the boxes were storing the left over saddles and equipment from the horses that must’ve once lived there.

_Why is all this stuff still kept here?_

“Did he kick you out too?” the frost spirit asked quietly.

Pitch glanced over at him, and although sulking was utterly unseemly of someone Jack’s age, the glum spirit still managed to conjure a twinge of sympathy within him. It was a faint sort of sympathy, weak and quite insignificant, but the fact that it could be evoked at all was appalling and just managed to contribute to Pitch’s less-than-content state of existence.

Unhurriedly, he crossed the concrete floors, meticulously swept despite the lack of animals living in the stables, and slumped onto a crate in front of Jack’s hideaway. The low shelf the spirit was occupying offered a less-than-comfortable surface for Pitch to recline his head on, but having the chance to just shut his eyes without worrying about toppling over from nausea was too good to pass up.

“I wasn’t interested in the story,” he said as he heard Jack shuffle about.

The frost spirit snorted self-depreciatingly. The noise was close to Pitch’s head, as if Jack had shifted nearer. “Why not? Seems important enough that there are Imperials looking for us over it.”

_Important enough that they were prepared to take you at sword point over it_ , Pitch added silently, scowling slightly at the memory of seeing that silver blade against pale skin and Jack’s staff hitting the footpath.

“Regardless of the fact that you don’t even know what happened,” Pitch muttered. When Jack didn’t respond, didn’t even _agree_ , Pitch felt his lip curl into a smirk and he added lowly, “You are trouble, Jack. A tiny, icy beacon of trouble.”

“Then why are you still here?” was the whispered reply.

Pitch’s eyes opened at the sound of that question, at the way Jack’s tone reminded him of the broken questions Pitch had been put through last night. And how they’d made him _feel_. Craning his neck a little, he looked back over at the frost spirit, at the furls of ice he’d created on the wood while he’d been moping.

_I’m still here because I keep finding reasons not to leave_ , he wanted to say.

But if his pride or the shadows heard him admit something like that, he’d have the ugliest kind of uprising on his hands. So instead he said, “I hear I am instrumental in the success of Tanton’s master plan.”

Jack’s eyes grew wide in surprise. “You’re gonna help with that?”

“I have no reason not to.”

_And a few very rational reasons why sticking around here is a better idea than returning to the workforce and the Nightmares constantly hunting for my head_.

Jack’s mood seemed to lift a little, as if he was pleased with the news, and Pitch settled back against his uncomfortable pillow.

Light had begun to glow in earnest through the crack in the doorway, revealing motes of dust floating through the still air in a universal bid to find somewhere to settle. As Pitch watched the light expand and engulf more of the darkness, he felt something cold ghost near his head. He managed not to twitch – a commendable effort, and one which he congratulated himself on for a moment, until he realised that Jack was hesitating.

Pitch’s eyes rolled back, up toward the hand that had frozen a few inches from his hair, and he saw new fear manifest in the little menagerie in the spirit’s chest.

Some of the fear he knew – the tiny festering images bore the familiar silhouettes of rejection, of being ostracized and isolated, of hurt – but it annoyed him no end that many of Jack’s fears were utterly unrecognizable. He figured, somewhere in his rational mind, that it was because of his waning power – he was losing his touch, his ability to translate image into fear – but some of Jack’s fears had never been well interpreted.

Namely, the shard of blood-dripping ice which was sitting in the corner of Jack’s chest right at that very moment.

Or the lotus, which Pitch, the keeper of fear, had come to the conclusion that he wholly _hated_.

“Do you still not believe me about the fae?” he finally asked, eyes on the hand hovering above him.

Jack flinched slightly, then lowered his hand to gently touch the ends of Pitch’s hair. “I believe you. I do. I just have to work through some shit in my head.”

The response didn’t sound like a lie, but something about Jack’s words sent a hint of unease through Pitch’s mind. He watched Jack’s eyes as his cold hand moved through dark locks, and when he found no traces of the hostility or hurt from earlier, he decided that he might as well believe the spirit for now. He was grateful, at least, that he wouldn’t have to drag the smith or someone equally as vexing down here to provide an eyewitness account for his case.

Remembering the conversation from last night – an irritatingly enlightening one, might he add – Pitch murmured, “Sounds familiar.”

Jack smiled a little, a spark of wry amusement in his eyes, and Pitch cast his gaze back out to the dust particles. “Did the Imperials hassle you guys in the Emporium?” Jack asked.

He couldn’t help but grimace. “The Emporium is not known for its upstanding legal habits, so whenever Imperials drop by they always try to provoke us into something drastic. But yesterday the stallholders were surprisingly well behaved. Except Inari with her crying.”

The frost spirit jolted, hand leaving Pitch’s hair so it could ball into an angry fist. “They made Inari cry?” he exclaimed in disgust.

Pitch nearly laughed at the potency of the reaction, especially since, as far as he knew, Jack had never even _met_ the kitsune. “Put your chivalry away. She was putting on a show to make them uncomfortable.”

Jack deflated, almost comically so. “Oh. Well, good. Did it work?”

“Exceedingly well.”

Jack made a face and settled back onto his stomach, his head turned toward Pitch but his fingers remaining tightly under his arms. “Maybe I should have tried that.” After a brief pause, he abruptly groaned and buried his face in his arms. “You defended us and now they know that you lied to them,” Jack mumbled into his jumper.

“ _Evaded_ ,” Pitch corrected.

Icy eyes snapped up. “It’s the same fucking thing, Pitch. I don’t want you to get in trouble for something like that.”

The Nightmare King, not for the first time, found himself unnervingly affected by the spirit’s concern for him. _Unnerved_ still being the dominate feeling, but affected nevertheless. “Jack,” he said in a low tone, and the spirit’s eyes flickered over to meet his. “I am older than their empire and not at all intimidated by their preposterous authority. And if they try to exert it over me, I’ll fill their capital with fear and rot the empire from the inside out.”

After a brief moment spent absorbing the seriousness of the statement, the corner of Jack’s lip lifted mischievously. “After you get some more beauty sleep?”

Pitch rolled his eyes but didn’t bother to defend his pride for once. Like it even mattered, at this point. Especially after Jack had seen him practically pass out after yesterday’s ordeal. “And scare my way through a few major cities.”

Jack frowned, unimpressed. “That’ll take a while, then.”

That, Pitch had to chuckle at, and he didn’t even regret letting the rumble leave his throat when he saw how the sound left a sprinkling of purple flush across Jack’s cheeks. “Is the frost spirit impatient to see the fall of the Fae Empire?” he mocked, smirking when Jack tried to hide his face in the bend of his elbow.

The spirit narrowed his eyes a little, and replied, “Depends if the Nightmare King’s all talk or actually willing to avenge my apparently ruined face.”

_Hmm_.

Utilising sheer willpower to hold the nausea at bay for the time being, Pitch stood and kicked the crate to the side with the sole of his boot. With a jerk of his head he gestured for Jack to move forward. “Sit up.”

The spirit looked at him warily. His eyes skittered off toward the opened door, and for a second there Pitch thought he might actually run for it. He’d be disappointed, he supposed, although not altogether surprised if the frost spirit regretted offering himself up to Pitch. It would certainly explain why Jack could barely meet his eyes earlier when they’d all been drawn into the kitchen by the offensive rain.

However, surpassing his quite pessimistic expectations, Jack didn’t run. After making a decision that seemed to involve some angry twitches of his eyebrows, he threw his legs over the side of the wood, and Pitch found that he had to look up a few inches to be able to find Jack’s eyes. Knees hit the side of Pitch’s waist, and the Nightmare King moved forward until Jack’s legs were forced further apart and their proximity made the spirit’s flush deepen desirably.

“May I touch you?” he asked.

Jack’s eyes widened a little. “You’re asking me?”

“I am, because I want to,” he admitted, and was pleased to hear the hitch in Jack’s breathing. Pitch wet his bottom lip thoughtfully, attracting a brief flicker of Jack’s eyes, and decided to add, “I know you wanted me to last night. But not today.”

Jack flinched back, but something in the way Pitch held his eyes managed to convince him to return after only a few moments. Softly, hesitantly, he mumbled, “’s not the same,” and then, even more quietly, “You may.”

_So I was right._

With a carefulness he rarely ever employed in everyday life, Pitch placed his index and middle fingers, parted in a wide V, under Jack’s jaw and drew them down the sides of the spirit’s throat, at the very edges of marks he’d left yesterday. He felt Jack swallow under his fingers, his head tilt up slightly to reveal more of that lovely throat.

The bruises weren’t as dark as he’d thought they might be, but still visible enough to resurrect the pinch of guilt that’d bitten at him yesterday. The part of him that was being well and truly _decimated_ by the frost spirit’s very existence felt like apologising for them, felt like smacking his bloodlust and rage with a slipper and telling them that if a brash frost spirit could cough up a simple _sorry_ then why was he being such a weakling about it?

“They’re bruises, Pitch.” The man looked up and saw that Jack was frowning at him, like he couldn’t understand what he was seeing in Pitch’s expression. “They’ll fade and disappear in a few days and Phoenix will stop bitching about them.”

_But that isn’t the point_ , he thought as the rest of his twisted personality lamented the fact that his marks would disappear from Jack’s skin so _quickly_.

“Unless you feel like replacing them.”

Startled, Pitch looked up into Jack’s cold eyes, at the delicate dusting of purple across the spirit’s cheeks and the tips of his ears. There was something wary in that stare, something entirely unsure and perhaps a little frightened.

_Fantastic. He’s finally afraid and it’s not even when I want him to be._

Sighing, Pitch moved his fingers over the spirit’s soft skin as he steadily held those icy eyes. His other hand came to rest on the shelf, just outside Jack’s thigh, as his middle finger found the pale hollow of Jack’s throat and dipped in to trace over flesh and bone. The spirit’s breath faltered and his eyes, curiously enough, lost their tinge of fear.

_He’s letting me do this so easily_ , Pitch thought as his hand ghosted over the neck of Jack’s jumper. The spirit’s eyes fell closed when Pitch drew his hand down his chest, his pale forehead knitting when Pitch’s fingers spread and kneaded into Jack’s ribcage, his waist. Two layers of clothing was a frustrating obstacle to the skin Pitch truly wanted to dig his fingers into, but it was an obstacle he had enough sense to respect. And it didn’t seem to matter at the moment, anyway – the very pressure of Pitch’s ministrations had Jack’s chest rising and falling heavily, white teeth on the verge of biting into his lip right before he realised what a painful mistake that would’ve been.

_His expressions might just be worth all those headaches he’s been giving me_ , Pitch thought softly.

He trailed a hand firmly over Jack’s abdomen, soft fabric bunching under his palm, and the spirit’s mouth parted slightly, a gasp falling from his lips when Pitch’s fingers reached the hemline of his pants. His knees parted, just a little wider, and the thigh by Pitch’s wrist was caught and trapped by a large hand.

Jack’s eyes opened, blue falling onto the fingers beneath his navel, and then rising slightly to Pitch’s own. A lick of fear was curling into his chest, a small one, the same fear that had manifested yesterday when Pitch had touched Jack’s skin.

“I won’t do anything you don’t want me to,” Pitch found himself saying, his tone low and quiet because he _knew_ Jack’s fear all too well himself. Jack’s eyes went wide for a moment, and then a crack of warmth seemed to bring the tilt of a smile to his face and melt whatever might have been still iced over in his eyes.

And then the spirit’s sense of wickedness returned with a vengeance, and with a cocked eyebrow, he said, “I guess you should keep working your way down, then.”

Pitch couldn’t help but laugh at the sheer _audacity_ of this spirit. Without any warning or an inch of delicacy, he hooked his hands under Jack’s knees and yanked him forward until he sat teetering on the edge of the wood, body flush against Pitch’s and that provocative look wiped clean off his face.

With a startled curse, Jack’s hands shot out to Pitch’s shoulders to maintain balance. They dug in for good when Pitch was finally able to reach and bite at his neck.

“Do I replace these marks with my fingers or my mouth?” he purred. Through his torso and under the fingers now pressing into Jack’s thighs, he felt the shudder that ran through the spirit in response to his words. His hunger returned, _begging_ , and it turned absolutely ravenous when Jack pushed up against Pitch’s abdomen and choked on a moan.

_Fuck_. Pitch gritted his teeth for the sake of his own composure, and he had to wonder how he had missed _this_ all those times he’d seethed at Inari’s behest over the spirit.

A hand left Pitch’s shoulder to knot painfully in his hair, and he exhaled shakily against Jack’s neck, warm breath hitting cool skin and the male beneath his hands panted, “Hah, shit. Mouth. Definitely mouth.”

Obligingly, Pitch’s tongue darted out to press against Jack’s icy skin, biting at unmarred flesh and licking at bruised, until the spirit was _whimpering_ and Pitch both appreciated and _hated_ the fact that the shelf’s height prevented them from making any serious bodily contact.

He pulled back slightly and in a voice that’d grown rough, asked, “Even at the risk of my own peril?”

Jack exhaled a laugh and softly pulled Pitch’s head back by his hair so he could find the Nightmare King’s eyes. “I’ll give Phoenix a play by play of how you gave them to me and he’ll be too busy having a heart attack to worry about you.”

The wickedness of the idea had something purring in Pitch, and the smirk that graced the spirit’s face only made it rumble with pleasure. But the expression also drew Pitch’s gaze to the angry split that tore the side of Jack’s lower lip. Pitch absently brushed it with the corner of his thumb, a touch of something hypocritically malicious stirring within him, and Jack flinched and pulled back.

“You weren’t afraid,” Pitch murmured. “Not even with a sword at your throat.”

_A poisoned sword_ , he remembered darkly. A poisoned sword potent enough warrant a _werewolf_ to _amputate_ the cut limb.

“I was scared,” Jack replied, barely audible. “I was scared that if I didn’t drop my staff all of you would die.”

_That’s not what you’re meant to be afraid of_ , a part of Pitch protested, while the rest of him critically realised that he hadn’t seen any such fear when he’d been watching Jack being led by that swordsman. But then again, he remembered with a trace of bitterness, he couldn’t recognise a lot of fears anymore.

Jack blinked and recoiled a little, shifting back a few inches so he could sit properly on the shelf. The lust was slowly draining out of his expression now, and Pitch’s fingers lifted off his legs to give him more room to move. “Are you judging me for being afraid of that?”

Confusion pinched at Pitch’s brow. “What?”

The frost spirit’s eyes became a little unclear, before lines of hurt began etching their way across his skin and toward his eyes. He turned his gaze away from Pitch and mumbled, “It’s not stupid.”

Coming from a king who was still getting over the fact that someone had enough lacking sense to be afraid _for_ him rather than _of_ him, Pitch would agree that Jack’s concern – strong enough to have him drop his only means of defence when at the point of a poisoned sword, need that be repeated – _was_ utterly unwise.

But it was also appreciated on levels that Pitch was still trying to deny existed, so he was not yet inclined to point out how Jack’s wisdom needed a stern lecture.

Pitch used a hand to redirect Jack’s gaze, forcing it down to meet his. “You are entitled to feel whatever you think is necessary. I _feed_ on fear, I do not judge it,” he replied as he searched the spirit’s eyes to see if his response was suitable.

Jack swallowed and, after a moment, he managed a small nod. “You’re gonna need to do that soon, aren’t you?”

Despite how hard it was to find a decent meal with his Nightmares stalking him, yes he did. But not yet. He could probably survive another day or so without ample fear before he really did collapse like some starved adventurer in the desert.

Probably.

At the very least, he could live out another few minutes like this, with the frost spirit watching him with a look in this eyes that was entirely too steady for Pitch’s taste. He wanted to see that blue melt again, to warm into chaotic liquid under Pitch’s hands.

He tilted the spirit’s chin down with his fingers, forcing Jack’s jaw to drop and his lips to part. It was a gentle movement, lax enough that the spirit easily enough broke away from the hold when he said, “Are you afraid of a little blood?” with the softest taunt in his voice.

Pitch scoffed, causing the spirit to grin a little and his face to lose those lines of hurt. Before Jack could quip at him again, the Nightmare King drew him closer and licked roughly at the corner of his mouth.

Exhaling a curse, Jack laughed and shoved Pitch away from him, keeping a hand firmly fisted in the lapel of his jacket despite the force he was applying. “Freak,” he said with a grin, a tongue darting out to touch the spot Pitch had just dragged his own over. The movement was small, brief, and yet the man’s eyes remained, despite the self-control he almost certainly had somewhere in his body, fixed on the spirit’s mouth. The grin began to fade when Jack realised how intent Pitch was, and drawn by the Nightmare King’s eyes alone, the spirit dipped his head in closer.

 “FROST!”

Jack went rigid, and Pitch shot an irritated look out the crack of the stable door, toward where the fire spirit’s voice had come from.

The hand bunching his jacket clenched, and Pitch looked back at Jack’s face to see fresh lines of fear meet in his eyes. Feeling a little nauseous from all the good deeds he’d been doing recently, yet apparently more than ready to suffer some more, Pitch reluctantly stepped back from the spirit. The movement startled Jack, but the hand remained balled in the fabric of Pitch’s coat as the spirit looked down at him.

“I thought we established that you weren’t a coward,” Pitch uttered, every bit a challenge.

The fire that lit in the spirit’s eyes was more than satisfactory, and with a narrowed glare, Jack took hold of his staff and leapt down off the shelf.

Before he left, though, he used the grip he still persistently maintained on Pitch’s coat to drag the Nightmare King down to his height and press his mouth against Pitch’s briefly.

“I’m not,” he said, flushed and determined and severely _testing_ the control Pitch was pretty sure had fled at some point last night.

Then he let the Nightmare King go, and Pitch straightened his back as he watched the spirit fly out of the stables and toward the irritation still calling his name.

_Definitely going to ruin me_ , he thought as his tongue traced the lips Jack had just touched, and the lingering taste of blood and snow he’d left behind.

 

* * *

 

Jack was going to punch Phoenix one of these days. If not just because he generally deserved a good smack down, then because cockblocking Jack deserved grave punishment. The gravest. Especially since it was already difficult enough to remain _in the moment_ with his thoughts constantly trying to drag him _out of it,_ let alone having to deal with a _physical_ _entity_ forcibly drawing him away from the king he _didn’t want to leave_.

He wanted to kick Phoenix. Kick him in the shins and return to Pitch so he could feel the man’s tongue in his mouth and die happy.

“I don’t want to talk to you!” Jack hollered when he caught sight of the fire spirit looking for him in a flowery bush.

Phoenix swung around, and before Jack knew what was happening, the spirit was stalking over to him and grabbing Jack by the back of the neck. Jack hissed at him, at the pain of the skin-on-skin contact and how close Phoenix had suddenly gotten without warning.

Their foreheads smacked together, heat and ice sizzling, and Jack winced when he saw how genuinely fear-ridden and sorry Phoenix’s expression was. “You’ve always trusted me, Frost.”

Jack tried to pull back, pull away from the pit of emotions the fire spirit was trying to throw him into. But Phoenix held fast and forced their eyes to meet. “ _Keep_ trusting me,” he begged. “ _Please_.”

This time, he let Jack pull back a little, if only so neither of them would be left with welts on their faces. “Will you tell me what you know?”

“No,” Phoenix whispered, pain clear in his voice. “I’m holding onto this for both of us, so just let me. Okay?”

_“Open your eyes, Frost. You can’t hide from this.”_

Jack felt sick, but he didn’t argue with Phoenix. Because he did trust him. It hurt, hurt more than trust should, but it was there and had been invested in the fire spirit for too long now to withdraw it.

“Okay,” Jack mumbled, swallowing when Phoenix squeezed the back of his neck and let go.

“Good.” Phoenix backed up, a relieved calm entering his eyes as he gestured toward the house. “Put on your going out pants, Skreek’s taking us on an excursion.”

Jack scowled, not liking the sound of that. “What, where?”

“Fae realm.”

_Seriously_? After facing down those Imperials less than an hour ago, was it even _wise_ to go frolicking through their home turf so soon? “Why do we have to go? I’m not really interested in watching Yves get fitted up for a new suit.”

“They’re also ordering the tea,” Phoenix said with a meaningful look – one which Jack carefully ignored. “So tell your dumbass king that he has to come along too or Tanton will cry.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry this update took longer than usual, Uni has started back up again and i had to write an essay on Hannibal invading Italy (he's such a lad) and this chapter just took FOREVER. ugh. 
> 
> regardless, thank you for all your kudos and comments once again, they all make me smile so much and thank you for sticking with the story so far!!


	17. Desperation (Part I)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the gang venture off into the scummiest part of the fae realm, and Jack cracks under the pressure of everything happening around - and within - him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> first off, I AM SO SORRY THIS UPDATE TOOK SO LONG. But i am here now, the pain train lives on.
> 
> and secondly, as a warning there's some self harm at the ends of these two chapters (the before and aftermath of it).

Skreek was the living definition of unorganized.

He was efficient when it counted – ruthlessly so, and his ability to make snap decisions had saved his wolves from many hair-raising predicaments. But most of the time the actual organization of his horde was left in the hands of his captains (Clyde, Tanton, Xani, and Yanov), and they were the ones who kept the horde, as well as their commander, from falling to pieces.

And since his captains (except Tanton) were otherwise occupied with the more pressing matter of stitching themselves and the other werewolves back together after their brawl with Yves, and Tanton alone was not enough of a force to keep Skreek’s chaotic tendencies from surfacing, it took nearly the whole day for the overlord to get his shit together and finally declare that it was time to leave for the fae realm.

At first, Jack hadn’t exactly minded the delay. After all, it gave Yves enough time to finish meticulously sorting through twelve catalogues of suit fabric (only to decide on a pattern from the first), and for Jack’s face to look somewhat less like he’d recently been struck by an Imperial dog.

But that was about the extent of his contentment.

Because Skreek’s lack of organisation not only corrupted the lives of his captains, but it apparently required Pitch’s every waking moment to be surrendered to the werewolves. And once Skreek started laughing and jostling and Tanton started scheming, Jack couldn’t so much as get a word in let alone drag the Nightmare King away from the wolves and get back to making out with him.

And if that didn’t drive him absolutely mad, then the glances Pitch kept throwing his way when he was well aware that Jack was stalking him were just plain cruel.

They weren’t even _heated_ looks – Jack was pretty damn sure he’d die on the spot if Pitch ever tossed him one of those without warning. They were just these little slices of acknowledgement that just _did_ something to Jack. Something that was so _pathetic_ considering how easily the man could forget all about him, but they still made Jack feel as if a tiny piece of Pitch’s attention was reserved especially for him.

And it brought Jack a trickle of happiness.

And so every time their eyes met Jack held him for as long as Pitch could afford to offer him his attention, and every now and then the king would graze eyes filled with silver over the artwork he’d left on Jack’s neck. The artwork Jack had actually asked for this time – the set the frost spirit had to hunch his shoulders in polite company to hide – and it made a cold burn spark in the pit of his stomach.

But it never lasted long enough to be satisfying.

And whenever Pitch was forced to look away, to ignore Jack’s presence, the cold spark swirled into a hollow sort of ache that just hurt so _damn much_.

It was like the coin analogy from the other night was already returning to haunt him, to show him that even when Pitch was on his best behaviour, Jack was still gonna hurt.

_You’re a fool_ , his thoughts spat. _So suffer like one._

The tree Jack was perched in had just started to ice up with his bitterness when Phoenix, with shockingly good timing, told Jack with an unnecessary fireball to come and spend some quality time with their child.

Jack didn’t bother arguing with the fire spirit – in fact, he was a little thankful for Phoenix’s intervention. Along with successfully pulling him from his depressing thoughts, Lani was a tiny angel, and a strong part of Jack missed properly spending time with children. So he followed Phoenix from the barracks wordlessly, heedless of the giant icicles that crashed to the ground after he’d abandoned his tree.

Or the golden eyes that were watching him leave.

The little banshee still couldn’t leave the attic and the tinkling of the piano without descending into banshee-worthy hysterics – which was a problem Jack and Phoenix agreed they’d have to remedy soon – so the two put on a show for her in the cramped attic space. Phoenix played a wizard, with a long fiery beard and a staff of twisting flames, and Jack was a knight with a sword of ice preparing to fight the flaming old grump for the honour of having a dance with the tiny blue princess.

The piano, above an ever-present silence-filling hum, offered a dramatic score for Jack and Phoenix’s show. The attic misted up with steam, Phoenix’s clothes clung to him in the most unappealing way thanks to the humidity, and Jack was constantly icing up smouldering rafters.

All through it, though, Lani applauded and giggled and the sound of her laughter brought an incredible warmth to Jack’s heart.

He missed this. This fun. This silliness. It was always so easy – so much easier than aching over a gloomy king.

_Then leave his place_ , his thoughts murmured. _Leave this place and return to the fun you were having before that day at the Workshop_.

A part of him wanted to. Wanted to so _badly_.

“Frost?”

Jack jerked back from the spluttering end of Phoenix’s staff, and on reflex raised his own staff between himself and the flames in self-defence. He could feel his mind fragmenting, trying to piece itself back together in a way that Jack wasn’t sure he approved of. He needed to stop it. He needed to –

_Go_ , his thoughts whispered.

Jack took a step back from the fire spirit, the mist folding around him like an enveloping cocoon. He took another step, a step toward the door. “Uh… I surrender.”

Phoenix narrowed his eyes, two pockets of fire in a translucent grey sea. If they didn’t have an audience, Jack was positive he’d be getting an earful for his sketchy behaviour. But for the sake of the show, and the tiny little banshee watching on in concern, Phoenix turned from Jack and embarked suddenly on a dramatic monologue wherein he praised himself for being the best fighter in all of the kingdoms and warned the ice knight to turn himself over into the hands of the fire mages.

But by that point, Jack was gone.

With the skies tearing into sunset reds once again, Jack tracked his way out onto the crow-infested lawns. Nothing remained of their pre-dawn affairs – whatever carnage had been left behind after Yves’s fight with the wolves had been meticulously cleaned either by the man himself or his crows, and the same went for the bloodstain Jack’s wound should have left on the pavement.

He touched his lip with his tongue, thankful that it was no longer spontaneously bleeding, and looked down at the sword of ice he was carrying in his right hand. It was a long blunt blade, the ice translucent and in no way reminiscent of the homewrecker that belonged to that Imperial. He held it out before him, and tilted the ice until the crimson sky painted the faux blade a gruesome shade of red.

_Why are you stopping?_ his thoughts nudged. _You wanted to leave, so leave._

Jack twitched, but forced himself to remain with his feet planted to the ground. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Io and Mo scramble amongst the crows and finally find their way over to him. “Why do they always make leaving sound so appealing?” he asked the two scaries. “I don’t want to go. Right?”

Mo came up and sat on Jack’s feet, either to cement Jack’s decision to stay or to protect his poor toes from Io and the crows, and Io jumped excitedly for the sword Jack had in his grasp.

“At least one of you is helpful,” Jack said with a small smile as he waved the sword around Io’s head, making the scarie spin in excitement.

_Can you just focus for three fucking seconds. You just said before that you wanted to leave. Now,_ go _._

“Just because I miss spending time with kids doesn’t mean I want to leave,” he snapped, and squeezed his eyes shut in frustration as he scratched the back of his neck with the dull tip of the sword. “Stop fucking twisting everything I think. I told you already that you can’t manipulate –”

“Who are you talking to?”

Jack froze. He looked over his shoulder and saw the Nightmare King watching him, gold and silver in his eyes and a line of concentration drawing down the middle of his forehead.

Jack swallowed. Something began to vibrate nervously in his stomach and his mind.

_Tell him and I will tear your brain into tiny little pieces,_ his thoughts threatened, low and dangerous.

Jack gritted his teeth, his eyes skirting away from Pitch.

_You know I can._

He bit down on his tongue.

When it was clear that the spirit had no response, warmth brushed against Jack’s neck, and the frost spirit’s eyes fluttered closed as muscular fingers curled around the side of his throat. A palm joined them, and finally the fingers found their way under Jack’s chin and tilted the frost spirit’s head back.

Hot breath met Jack’s ear, and the spirit shuddered as Pitch murmured, “Are you going to ignore me, Jack?”

Like he ever could. A thumb scraped down over the bites and bruises on Jack’s skin and he felt his breath grow shallow. He wanted more of the warmth. Needed more of it. He –

_He’s like a dog, making sure his territory is still marked. Do you like being treated like a pissed-on tree, Jack? Ha, what am I saying, of course you do._

A choked noise made its way out of Jack’s throat without his permission, and he shifted out of Pitch’s grasp, away from the king as a terrible itch began to tug at his skin. He dislodged Mo in the process, the scarie _mipping_ at him in semi-distress, and Jack couldn’t even bring himself to look back at the man he’d been pining after all day, had been wanting to touch all day – but he needed to apologise, needed to –

“Fine,” Pitch suddenly said. Jack flinched, but there wasn’t any actual anger in the man’s voice. Annoyance, yes, but he didn’t sound like he was mad. “Then, why do you have a sword?”

This he could answer, right? Jack turned toward Pitch and, with a smile that felt as fake as the sword in his hand, held out the blade toward the king. “Can’t you tell? I’m a knight who was tragically bested in a battle against an asshole fire mage to win the hand of a little blue princess.”

An unimpressed brow twitched. “Ah,” the Nightmare King deadpanned. “So you were being a nuisance.”

Feeling his nerves ease a fraction, Jack stuck his tongue out at the man. “We didn’t burn down anything, so what’s the harm in having a little fun?”

Pitch looked like he had a million things to say about that, but he probably figured it was wasted on Jack and mercifully didn’t bother.

Jack tilted his wrist and the sword’s handle slid from his grasp to land in the grass. Io, as if all its Christmases had come at once, tripped over itself to get to the sword and positively fawned over it while it had the chance.

“Little sword thief,” Jack muttered as the scarie began pushing at it with its head to get the thing out of the ground.

“I once had a sword like that.”

Jack’s gaze flew to Pitch. The Nightmare King was…sharing information? The guy hardly ever talked about himself, so it was hard to keep the surprise out of his voice when Jack replied with a cautious, “Yeah?”

Pitch’s eyes slid over the ice appraisingly, and as if in a memory, he murmured, “Only it was bigger. Much bigger. I was the only person strong enough to swing it with one hand.”

Jack didn’t find it hard to imagine. Pitch probably still had the muscles for it, as well. “Would it have made that shiny Imperial sword look like a toothpick?”

Pitch’s eyes narrowed, and snapping out of his wistful mood, settled a glare on Jack. “If it wasn’t poisoned, I’d snap the puny thing over my knee and force the faerie to eat it.”

Jack cringed a little at the mental image, but the utterly peeved look on Pitch’s face made the smallest of grins tilt at the corner of Jack’s mouth. Although he wanted to, instead of prying, just in case the spell of nostalgia had been broken, Jack asked, “When’s the smith going to be finished with your new scythe?”

Pitch touched the handle of the sword with his boot, tipping it out of the ground for Io, and the scarie began to excitedly drag the spike of ice off into the flurry of crows. “He usually takes a few weeks to make the scythes.”

Watching Io leave (and Mo hurriedly follow behind), Jack asked, “So how do you fight off your Nightmares while he’s busy making you a weapon?”

Pitch twitched at the question.

_The coward doesn’t_ , his thoughts laughed.

“What? But how –”

The spirit’s jaw immediately tightened when he realised he’d begun to speak aloud, and felt a little like running off with the scaries when he looked up and saw that a scowl had formed on Pitch’s face.

Shit.

But, saving him from whatever _talk_ they might’ve been about to descend into, Jack spotted three familiar figures meandering toward them.

Jack caught a freshly-clothed Phoenix cock his thumb toward the house as he said to Skreek, “Tanton was sulking about not being able to come so I put him on Lani-sitting duty.”

“Good thinking,” the werewolf replied, and Jack noticed, with a dash of wariness, that neither he nor Yves were wearing ties.

Unless shit was critical, those two _always_ wore ties.

Pitch turned at the sound of approaching voices – but not without giving Jack one last pointed glare – and Jack suddenly found himself confronted with the broad but lean expanse of Pitch’s back.

And how warm it looked.

Without thinking, Jack took a few steps forward and buried his face in the back of Pitch’s coat. Pitch stiffened as soon as Jack touched him, but with a quick raised-brow glance over his shoulder, decided not to question the spirit. Jack was thankful for that. The coat smelt like Pitch, just like it had on Halloween, and he breathed in the warmth in hope that it would soothe some part of his shivering soul.

“You still can’t have the coat,” he heard Pitch mutter, and Jack grinned just a little.

“You lot all ready?” Skreek asked everyone. “We got Jack?”

“He’s here,” Pitch said, and Jack buried himself a little deeper in the king’s back.

Without doubting Pitch for even a millisecond, Skreek boomed, “Fantastic! Yves, if you would.”

After Jack thought he heard the squeak of a brief polishing, Yves murmured, “Skørj, take us to the lower districts of the fae realm.”

“Ugh, why,” Phoenix grumbled as somewhere, not too far away, a sword made of ice exploded into powdered snow (because Jack was seriously not stupid enough to leave a freaky thing like Io alone with a sword) and the cackling laughter of Skørj carried everyone away.

Not thirty seconds later, the five of them were being dumped in not only the lowest, but the _worst_ district in the Fae Empire, and Jack realised exactly why Phoenix had been grumbling.

The frost spirit had been to some scummy places in his life time. But the lowest of the downtown districts of the Fae Empire had always held a special spot in Jack’s cold heart – a spot that did not exist, just like any love he might have for the place.

The shadow-sheathed streets were filled with grime and broken glass, windows were boarded and doors had the Imperial emblem slashed across them in crimson paint. Screams could be heard from inside broken-down buildings and smoke from some pyromaniac’s contribution to society was pluming above a row of houses a couple of blocks away, filling the air with a thick cloud of grey.

And all the while, the grand Imperial castle, glowing bright and white like some holy emblem against the dark sky, stood buried in the side of an emerald hill on the opposite side of the empire’s cityscape. It was watching, like it always did – but from its far-off vantage point, well out of the contaminating reach of the rot living all the way out in the downtown districts, or the barbarian tribes that lived beyond the city walls across the ancient countryside.

Or the dead white forest at the very edge of the realm.

Jack always felt ill in this place. He disliked the fae realm in general, and with each district closer to the Imperial castle, his dislike grew until it almost turned into hatred.

But he couldn’t bring himself to seriously hate it. Not fully. Because the fae were arrogant and self-contained and worked their own climate within the walls of their realm, which meant that whenever Jack was having a bad day with Boreas, he could find a ring of mushrooms and teleport his way into the downtown districts (the only districts besides the tribal hillsides that didn’t have border security) to chill since the wards prevented any of the seasonal courts from interfering here.

As Phoenix began to bitch about exactly where they’d ended up, Jack glanced up and noticed, with a small laugh, that Pitch was looking particularly in his element. There was even the beginning of a smile on his face – an evil one, to be specific – and when he felt Jack’s eyes, he turned that smile down onto the frost spirit.

Jack shivered, just a tiny bit. It had been a while since he’d seen Pitch looking truly evil – not just spiteful or putting on a show while he was being an asshole – and he’d be lying if he said it wasn’t a good look on the man.

“I’ll find you once I’m finished,” Pitch informed the shorter male, the gold in his eyes already kicking into gear with all the calamity happening in the buildings around them.

Jack just nodded, flushing a little, and Pitch evaporated into a waft of shadows.

_He’s probably gonna go off and find something else to fuck since you’re such a boring twit._

Some more screams rattled through a building a few blocks away and Jack muttered, bitterly, “If you’re going to give commentary on everything I do, at least come up with some actually believable scenarios.”

_Or I can just rattle on about your precious king tossing you aside for someone with more of a brain until you believe it’ll happen. Ha, or even that it already_ has _happened. That’d be great. You’d really start going crazy, then._

Jack’s teeth ground, white molars grating until his thoughts added, _Just imagine the creep embracing someone better than you. Someone more worthwhile than you. I bet his mistress is –_

“Shut _up_. He doesn’t have a mistress.”

“What’s this about a mistress?” Phoenix asked, elbowing Jack in the spine.

Jarred but always coherent enough to inflict bodily damage on Phoenix, Jack smacked the fire spirit away and shoved him forward, toward where Skreek and Yves were already ambling down the blood-splattered sidewalk like they were taking a nice romantic stroll. “None of your business.”

Phoenix eyed him as he allowed himself to be nudged on down the dark street and Jack remembered, for a moment, the words the fire spirit had said to him yesterday morning.

_“You’ve always trusted me, Frost._ Keep _trusting me._ Please _.”_

As Phoenix finally relented with the scrutiny, Jack properly took stock of the fire spirit, of the fiery hair and ragged clothes he’d found familiarity in for two hundred years now.

_I do trust him_ , he thought as he watched Phoenix squint around the darkened street in avid suspicion. _I just want to know what I’m trusting him with._

_Do you though?_ his thoughts replied.

Irked at his thoughts’ _constant_ interjections, Jack ignored the question.

Unwilling to risk tearing his bare feet to pieces by walking along the sidewalk, Jack slicked up a strip of the road and hoisted himself onto the smooth ice. It didn’t take him long to catch up with the others, and when he did he followed Phoenix’s squint and sized up a group of black-coated fae congregating under a rotting awning. They were rebels, he noted once he caught an eyeful of the badges sewn into the wool of their clothing.

Although he was thoroughly uninterested in the political turmoil that’d been happening in the lower districts of the empire, he’d heard enough from Bunny’s moralising news readings to know that these streets had not been this quiet a few years ago. In fact, for the last century and a half they’d been through rebellion after revolt after political upheaval and the uprisings were always as sporadic as they were bloody.

Jack and Phoenix had been caught in the middle of one once, and the image the scene had left with Jack just contributed to the reason why he disliked the realm so much.

“Jack boy,” Skreek said, peering around their small group in mild concern, “where’s Pitch? He didn’t get nabbed, did he?”

Before Jack could even try to answer, Phoenix bit out a quick, “Frost said something about a mistress.”

Yves glanced back with half a glare on his face while Skreek’s eyebrows rose in full horror. As he skated, Jack smacked Phoenix with his staff – _beat_ him, really – until the fire spirit was laughing and Jack was about to hook him with his staff and toss his over-heated ass onto his path off ice.

But then he got a better idea.

Pointing at Skreek before the werewolf could start asking anything thoroughly invasive, Jack said, “Phoenix is lying. The guy’s probably off jumping out of people’s closets.”

Skreek’s eyebrows lowered into a pitying pose, and Jack sighed.

Still laughing, the fire spirit stumbled across the footpath. With a small twirl and a deft crack of his staff, Jack tapped the pathway a few paces ahead of Phoenix (and a pace behind Yves and Skreek). Clear, slick ice spread across the pavement, splintering and gripping so swiftly that Yves, with his death-god worthy reflexes, was the only person who noticed its appearance.

A small smirk began to curl his mouth as the man, who’d thankfully _believed_ Jack, murmured, “Making the most of the city while we are here is wise.”

A heartbeat later, Phoenix let out a startled shout and fell on his ass on the slippery ice. Yves snickered, a noise that _still_ managed to sound like a partial-cackle, and Skreek nearly tripped over himself as he doubled over laughing.

Jack stuck his tongue out at Phoenix as he slid past him like a pro, and the three of them continued on, heedless of their fallen comrade yelling obscenities after them.

A few of the coat-wearing renegades took a moment from their colluding to severely judge Phoenix on his lack of coordination, and as soon as he noticed this, Phoenix quickly leapt to his feet and (with excessive care) hurried after the others.

After melting a portion of Jack’s slick path with a ball of fire – a melted hole which Jack vaulted over expertly, might he add – the spirits exchanged a sneer before Phoenix began stomping a few paces ahead of Yves, well out of Jack’s icy reach so he could sulk in peace.

Out of the corner of Jack’s eye, the frost spirit caught sight of a small clump of rags watching from the footpath on the other side of the street. He had to squint a little to properly see them – since the streetlights were downright pathetic in this place – and soon he realised that it was a trio of little horned fae.

Horned fae which were watching him slide across his ice with almost amusing captivation.

With a flick of his staff, Jack spun and filled the entire street behind and in front of him with ice thick enough to create a smooth surface over the dirty and bumpy road. He was thankful that he could still do this much, at least, without Boreas fucking it up. He watched the fae children creep tentatively, but excitedly, onto their makeshift ice rink.

A throat was cleared off to Jack’s side, and the frost spirit glanced back to his villainous comrades to see that Skreek had abandoned Yves in order to walk a little too closely to Jack. Up ahead, Phoenix was keeping his eyes on the children now helping each other up on the ice, while Yves marched on with added fervour.

“So,” Skreek uttered with about as much subtlety as the werewolf could manage (which, lord help Jack, was not much at all), “cake and a strip tease?”

Jack rolled his eyes at the question. “He doesn’t have a mistress. I don’t think.”

_You mean you_ hope _he doesn’t. And_ you know _what hope does to idiots like you. It leaves you kneeling before a monster who’ll sooner see you –_

Skreek made a noise with his nose that sounded almightily unnatural and was, mercifully, startling enough to put Jack’s thoughts off whatever disgusting trail they were heading down. “I’m not talking about that. We can fix _that_. I’m talking about what we _discussed_ the other day.”

Jack had the sinking feeling that Skreek’s “fix” had a whole lot of murderous connotations, and for a moment he didn’t know if he appreciated having Skreek on his side or if he was terrified of it. But then the main point of Skreek’s statement had Jack’s fingers twitching, begging to bend back and up and trail over the marks on the side of his neck. To feel over all the places Pitch had dug his fingers into yesterday, where the weight of his touch had left Jack breathless.

A fresh cold blew across the spirit’s cheeks and he said, with a little grin, “I don’t know, Skreek, since I don’t kiss and tell.”

The most unsubtle eyebrows in the universe rose and began to perform some kind of ritualistic dance that Jack was pretty sure was a product of their ever-increasing autonomy. “See!” the werewolf boomed, much louder than he needed to. “I told you that villains like the scrawny ones.”

“Oh yeah?” Jack asked with a hitching eyebrow of his own.

“Gather a sense of haste, you two,” Yves called back at them, already a few decent yards ahead of them all. “We have nearly arrived.”

The eyebrows did one last devilish sashay, a private show just for Jack, and the frost spirit laughed loud enough to draw withering glances from everyone loitering on the dingy street – except the little faeries, too busy spinning each other on the ice to even notice.

 

The alchemist Skreek was planning on trading with happened to be “hiding like a sissy from the Imperial bastards” in a tavern that was harbouring literally every single criminal in the empire. The exterior of the place, old and rotting with a sign buried in the soil by the door, was rough enough. But it couldn’t hold a candle to the scumbags it had as patrons.

Inside was an overcrowded battlefield. Over the sound of unruly laughter and cursing, Jack could hear insults being thrown between tables, terrible obscenities shouted over heads and across the paths the poor waiters had to walk. He could also hear the distinct sound of bottles smashing as some sort of fight was taking place toward the back of the place.

Moreover, there could be no better demonstration of the (lacking) quality of evil in the tavern than when Skreek, who usually got along with the criminals of the world, took one look around the place and wrinkled his nose in disinterest.

_They probably all know who_ you _are, then._

“This place is a hovel,” Phoenix muttered, raising eyebrows at a particularly messy brawl kicking into gear beneath the balcony off to their left.

Jack couldn’t have agreed more, but there was also something odd about the tavern. Familiar, almost. A giant carving of a winged mermaid hung above the bar itself, looking about ready to snap off its chains and behead all the thugs harassing the staff for more alcohol, and Jack could have _sworn_ that he’d seen something like it before, had thought the same morbid description before. He glanced around once more at the roughnecks having a great time trying to kill each other, and although nobody seemed to have looked over and recognised Jack, his thoughts’ sneering comment made something uneasy shift in him.

“Have we been here before?” he asked Phoenix.

The fire spirit snorted and shook his head. “I’ve never felt like getting glass in my face before, so no.”

A couple of unopened bottles of alcohol were placed onto the bar, and then promptly abandoned by a tall individual after a brief bout of angry swearing and pocket-patting. “Oh look, free booze,” Phoenix said happily, his primal dirtbag instincts locking in on his targets. He promptly went ahead and dumped Jack as he beelined for the bottles.

Skreek turned back down to Jack and clapped a hand on the spirit’s shoulder. “We’re going to go intimidate the barman into getting us an appointment with the alchemist. Go find us somewhere to sit.”

“If you can,” Yves added with a disgusted sweep of the bar.

Jack felt Yves’s look resonate with something in his very soul. “This place is packed out, Skreek.”

“Don’t tell me that all those years with the Guardians have stripped you of your bar etiquette,” the werewolf taunted. Jack had just begun to frown when Skreek’s eyes flickered over Jack’s head, and his expression became some not-so-distant relative of a leer. “Oh look, now you have some muscle to help you out. Good luck!”

Jack spun as Skreek pushed a protesting Yves off toward the bar, and his eyes immediately locked onto a tall, dark shadow peering in clear revulsion at the scene he’d stepped into.

“He looks healthy again,” Jack murmured to himself. Colour (albeit unnatural colour) was back in Pitch’s face and the tired lines of exhaustion had disappeared. He looked stronger, more stable, and on the verge of giving the guy who’d nearly stumbled into him a fear-induced aneurism.

_Would have been nicer if the Imperials had found his stalking ass and locked him up forever._

“He promised he’d destroy them if they tried,” Jack retorted as he ducked under some poorly dressed drunk carrying a tray of drinks. The thoughts didn’t bother offering Jack another response (a mercy, in itself) and Jack elbowed and pushed his way into Pitch’s line of sight.

The moment he spotted Jack, something seemed to unknot in the Nightmare King’s expression, and although Jack told himself that it was merely his imagination, his heart still stuttered and began to pick up.

“You feel better now?” Jack asked when he was close enough to barely brush the edges of Pitch’s coat.

“I missed the sound of screams,” he admitted, a malicious spark in his gold eyes.

Jack snorted a laugh at the admission – as well as the fact that _this guy_ had the audacity to call the Guardians weirdoes, when he was clearly no better. “I’ll take that as a yes,” he chuckled as he glanced around them, at all the chaos he was meant to find adequate seating in. “Where do you feel like sitting?”

“Somewhere less unscrupulous,” Pitch muttered with a judgemental sweep of the room. “Preferably not in this district, the fae realm in its entirety, or direct sunlight.”

Jack grinned at the sound of Pitch’s grumbling. “I would have thought the less scruples the better with a guy like you.”

Pitch just rolled his eyes back in exasperation. “I do have _standards_ with the filth I make contracts with.”

“I have no idea why you and Skreek aren’t already best friends.”

With an unimpressed tilt of his eyes, Pitch merely made a low noise in response, and Jack tongued his still-healing lip as he thought. “Hmm, _well_ , Yves and I hate crowds and judging by the look on your face you’re not too great with them either, so I’m thinking up on the balcony.”

Looking a little taken back by the observation, Pitch’s eyes narrowed in contemplation. “The claustrophobia?” he guessed.

Jack swallowed and nodded, looking up toward the table he was thinking about stealing. “Yeah.”

Without another word on the subject, Pitch raised an eyebrow when a crowd of jeering men leaned over the side of the balcony and poured their drinks onto the people brawling beneath them. “It seems to be taken already,” he observed mildly.

Jack threw a wicked smirk over his shoulder as he began cutting through the crowd. “Then we’ll just have to politely ask them to leave, won’t we?”

Two minutes later, after narrowly making it through the main floor of the tavern alive, Jack realised that he’d made a terrible decision. The second he and Pitch had scaled the creaking stairs to reach the only table in the whole place that seemed to be out of the path of flying bottles and bodies, the frost spirit caught sight of the pack of frankly horrifying faeries occupying his desired table as they yelled and punched and laughed at each other.

“They’re bigger than I was hoping,” he muttered.

_Scared of a few bandits?_

Jack scoffed. He’d half expected a taunt like that to come from the king of fear himself, but when he glanced behind him, at the man on the step below him (yet still infuriatingly taller than him), he saw a dry expression on Pitch’s face.

“I don’t think these particular faeries will respond well to diplomatic overtures.”

“I can always remove the diplomacy from the equation,” Jack contemplated. “Although we might get kicked out if I tear the roof off this place.”

“Do you want me to do it.”

Jack raised an eyebrow in challenge. “You think I can’t?”

“It would be more subtle,” Pitch reasoned wryly.

Jack nearly snorted. Pitch thought having a gang of fully-grown men run out of the bar shrieking was _subtle_? One of these days, Jack was going to acquire himself a dictionary and beat the proper meaning of the word into this guy. And Skreek as well, while he was at it.

Not that Jack had any real room to talk, but _still_.

In response though, Jack quietly taunted, “Where’s the fun in that?”

With a quirk of his lip, Pitch gestured, _Be my guest_ with a wave of his hand. Jack took a deep, fortifying breath as he climbed the last stair and sauntered up to the rowdy table of men.

“Gentlemen,” he said loudly, practically having to shout over their chatter. The faeries settled for a moment, all of them turning to glare at him for interrupting. “Are you enjoying your evening?” he asked in a pleasant tone, staff across his shoulders while his hands hooked over the twisted wood.

“The fuck do you want?” a faerie in a striped, ripped t-shirt demanded.

Jack just shrugged and glanced around at the little loft area. “It’s a nice spot you guys have up here, all tucked away. I mean, everyone downstairs is getting glass broken over their heads and there’s a bleeding body the waiters are still trying to clean up over by the toilets. I don’t know about you boys, but I’m not very good with blood. Or organs. And there’s _a lot_ of that going on down there at the moment.” His eyes strafed back to the table. “So, do you mind sharing?”

There was a pause of avid disbelief, which Jack pretended to take as a pause of confusion. “And by sharing,” he clarified, smile pleasant and polite, “I mean do you mind leaving.”

Laughter exploded from the faeries – anticipated laughter, since Jack knew this shit wasn’t going to be easy – but after the frost spirit stared at them for long enough, the laughter began to wane. Abruptly, glasses were slammed onto the table in rage, and two of the men rose from their seats as if they were ready to pummel the frost spirit. One of them had twisting horns large and sharp enough to impale Jack, and the frost spirit kept one wary eye on them in case the guy tried to.

The rest of them were no less terrifying. The faeries were huge, had probably gotten all those muscles from deadlifting the corpses of heroes who tried to steal their tavern tables, and although they could probably break all of Jack’s bones so _easily_ , the frost spirit didn’t so much as flinch from where he stood at the head of the table. How could he, anyway? He could feel Pitch’s eyes on the situation from where the man was lurking in the shadows a few feet away, and he’d be damned before he looked like a complete wuss in front of the king.

“Of course we mind,” one growled, “this is our table!”

“Who the fuck does this kid think he is.”

“Hey, wait, that staff –”

Jack’s eyes positively lit at that opening.

“Oh? You mean this old thing?” He let the staff fall curve-up onto the table, knocking over empty glasses and a half-filled bottle. He turned it side to side, as if inspecting the wood, while the only guy at the table with enough sense to know that he wasn’t just some “kid” began to sink back in his seat. “The magic in it gets real troublesome sometimes, though. But I suppose that’s what you get when Boreas is on the other end of the line.”

The faerie with the horns promptly sat down. “The Winter King?”

But the male in the striped t-shirt wasn’t as concerned. “Name dropping some old –”

The staff began to glow with intent, bright and cold blue, and Jack unleashed a burst of ice to drive his point home. The ice crackled and splintered, spreading first across the table and then spiking up toward the faces of the men trapped in their bench seats. Of course, Jack wasn’t in the business of actually _murdering_ people for a tavern table, but he wasn’t above halting the ice a mere breath away from soft throats and even softer eyeballs to intimated the hell out of them.

Needless to say, everyone froze.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t quite hear you. Pitch, did you catch what this guy was saying?”

Wide and narrowed eyes all swung to the figure of darkness as he stepped up behind Jack and said, “I might have if you’d let him finish.”

Jack shrugged and the ice began to creak. “Guess we’ll never know then.”

“Fucking hell!” the man in the striped t-shirt exclaimed. “Fine, have the fucking table.”

With a whole lot of grumbling and muttering, the gang gingerly (so as to not be skewered) cracked their drinks out of the ice and slid out of the high-backed bench seats, throwing angry curses at Jack as he waved them off with a smile.

A tap of his staff had the ice collapsing and dispersing into powdered snow all over the surface of the table and the seats, and Jack let out a relieved sigh as he collapsed backwards onto the snow lining a bench seat.

“Victory snow feels so _good_.”

There was no response, not even a snark, and he glanced up to see Pitch standing by the corner of the table, hands in his pockets while he gave Jack a strange look. “What are you staring at?”

“You – looking so pleased with yourself.”

Confused, Jack gestured to the piles of snow that clearly indicated his triumph. “I got them off the table, didn’t I?”

“You did,” Pitch agreed.

“So, do I get a reward?”

Pitch’s eyes narrowed, and when Jack noticed the Nightmare King’s mouth twitching in amusement, he sat up in the snow and cocked his eyebrow, just a little.

The gold began to scatter from Pitch’s eyes as the Nightmare King closed the distance between them. Planting one hand in the snow on the table, and the other on the back of the seat, he brought his face terribly close to Jack’s.

Jack’s eyes fluttered, a warm nose brushed alongside his, and the murmured words, “Good work,” wrapped around him like dark smoke.

It took Jack a solid moment to realise what Pitch had just said to him, and in the next his eyes were snapping open and he was flushing, furiously, to the great amusement of the king gravitating away from him.

“That’s not what I –,” he spluttered.

“Although your method was not what I was expecting.”

His embarrassment abruptly cracked, and something uneasy and uncomfortable swirled into Jack’s stomach. “I suppose I could have used my magic,” he mumbled, glancing at the settled snow, “but I didn’t really want to know what those guys considered to be fun.”

_That’s not what he’s getting at, idiot._

Realization poked him in the back, prompting Jack to look back up at the man questioning his techniques. He frowned when he saw a strange sort of calculation in Pitch’s expression – not a condemning kind, not like the judgement Bunny threw at him every second the Pooka was near him, but it still caused a low, prickling sense of indignation to well within the frost spirit.

“Shouldn’t you be getting a kick out of seeing people run scared?” he asked, and Pitch’s gaze sharpened slightly.

“It’s strange witnessing you do it,” the Nightmare King replied bluntly, eyes fixed on Jack’s face.

At any other point in time, Jack would have laughed off the statement. He would have let it roll right off his slim shoulders and collect in a puddle behind him, where he could leave it to dry up and die while he continued on with his life…

_Look at the great, hypocritical king making yet another flawed observation._

…but his thoughts prevented that, didn’t they? Anything Jack might ignore, they grabbed hold of, rattled it until Jack couldn’t even look away from it. They collected up all his emotions and assembled all the wrong ones, all the _unwanted_ ones, around the words spoken to him like some sacred conclave of _lies_.

_Aren’t you sick of hearing him assume that you’re weak and pathetic? Oh, but I suppose you are, aren’t you. Looks like he’s managed to get something right, at least._

Perfectly white teeth ground as the frost spirit’s jaw tightened, rage and guilt and sickness warring in his stomach for a victory he didn’t want any of them to acquire. But one of them was going to win, wasn’t it? And he already knew which one was being given a head start by his thoughts.

A lung full of ice cold air escaped his lips and Jack murmured, icily, “Because the only thing I’m good for is making snowballs and blizzards?”

After a brief, oh so brief moment of silence, Pitch exhaled a chuckle darker than his precious shadows. “So much _anger_ ,” he mocked, and Jack’s eyes narrowed.

“You’re being judgemental and it’s pissing me off.”

Pitch cocked a brow, and in a tone dry enough to draw as rough as sandpaper across Jack’s skin, said, “Like I told you this morning, I am no judge. I’m simply curious. One of those men was afraid of you, Jack. Not of your ice, of _you_. I want to know why.”

Trying, _desperately_ , to control his breathing and the _anger_ he didn’t _want_ , Jack got to his knees and shoved at Pitch to get the man out of his way. He knew what Pitch wanted to know, and it was too much right now. This conversation was too much. The man wouldn’t even budge but Jack needed space, space to think, space to _breathe_. If Pitch kept _looming_ and _talking_ to him like this he was going to snap at him because he couldn’t stop what was coming out of his mouth and they’d end up on the same hostile terms they started on.

The fabric under Jacks hands bunched as his fingers clenched, and he felt like _screaming_.

Why was this becoming so hard? _He_ should have been the level-headed one out of the two them. The easy-going one. He didn’t have Pitch’s paranoia or his grudges, he didn’t have anything inside of him that should have been making him feel like this whenever Pitch lightly nudged the side of a landmine.

So _why_.

_I_ told _you to listen to me. This is what you get for not taking the easy way out._

Why was his mind _doing this_.

Jack inhaled a shuddering breath, a breaking breath, and muttered, “What the fuck was meant to be the easy way out? Huh?”

Before Jack could even realise the mistake he’d made, warmth seared his cheeks, his ears, and fingers strong enough to crush windpipes dug painfully into his hair. Jack gasped, his hand cracking off Pitch’s shirt, but then his head was being yanked up and his gaze was caught by the seething grey-gold eyes of the king drenching Jack in his dark anger.

“You are talking to _me_ now.” Pitch’s voice was low and commanding, controlling, and Jack was anything but a submissive wimp but his mind was a _mess_ and he could feel his legs trembling under the weight of Pitch’s voice. Under the weight of his eyes. The hands in his hair tightened, fractionally, and Jack gritted his teeth, the warmth and pain lancing through his scalp managing, for a beautiful second, to draw a fissure through the anger trying to smother the rest of Jack’s emotions.

A frost-laced hand rose to a wrist near his ear, and he traced his fingers over the knuckles veiled in his hair. Pitch loosened his hold, silently accepting the icy touch, and the Nightmare King uttered, a little quieter but no less commanding, “So keep your eyes on me and answer my question.”

“I don’t want to,” the spirit mumbled, but he couldn’t look away, not even when the gold in Pitch’s irises flared. The man’s stare was trying to crush him, it was _going_ to crush him, and the anchoring hands in his hair were cultivating panic in his chest and Jack couldn’t _breathe_.

But he was still so pathetically captivated.

Pitch brought him closer, so close that his breath swept across Jack’s parted lips and the spirit managed a small, weak inhale. “Why not?” Pitch murmured. “You look so charming when you threaten people, did you know that Jack? Your eyes turn so cold.” The praise was too warm, too wrong, and it poured down Jack’s throat like smoke that was on the verge of scalding. Warm thumbs traced over Jack’s temples, and the spirit imagined, for one second, the tender touch gouging right into his eye sockets.

“I only want to know if it’s a lie or not.”

The spirit sucked in a ragged breath. Pitch could have clearly, like a _normal_ person, begun his interrogation into Jack’s life on a brighter note – by asking about his favourite colours or landmarks or how many times he’d driven Bunny half mad with well-crafted pranks – but, of course, Pitch wasn’t a normal person. He probably couldn’t give two shits about the mundane stuff Jack coloured his world with.

He wanted to know about the colourless, monochrome white that Jack was trying desperately to dye.

“I –”

_Stop letting him distract you and remember what he wants from you, idiot. All of the dirty secrets he’s asking you to put on show for him. Is that what you want, Jack? To open his eyes to the piece of trash you are?_

Jack squeezed his eyes shut and groaned. His staff clattered to the floor and he reached up and clawed at both of Pitch’s hands, dragging nails down the man’s wrists until he _knew_ Pitch could feel the pain because the man’s hands tightened back up again, a little too painfully this time.

The Nightmare King hissed at the frost spirit, but still he didn’t let go. _Why wasn’t he letting go?_

Jack’s eyes opened, and he stared at the mess of ice on Pitch’s chest before raising his gaze to the man’s furious but confused eyes. “Is this your screwed up way of getting to know me?” he sneered. “‘Oh, I don’t understand anything about you, _Jack_ , so why don’t you tell me the worst shit you’ve done and we’ll bond over it’.”

Pitch yanked his hands away from Jack’s head, from his nails, and the frost spirit had all of a second to see the red gashes on Pitch’s wrists and feel guilt, _guilt_ , before the man snapped, “What is _wrong_ with you?”

_He’s gonna think you’re craaazzy, Jack._

“Shut up! I’m NOT. Nothing is wrong with me! And if this is your way of understanding me, Pitch, I’d rather you just skip it altogether and get to fucking me.”

As soon as the words left his mouth, Jack had to bite down on his tongue to prevent anything worse from escaping. This was what he’d been afraid of, this was what he _didn’t want_ , and when Pitch’s expression stilled, drawing horribly cold, Jack began to shake. The tiny, determined part of him that wasn’t trying to _rage_ was shivering in nervousness and it was powerful enough to wrack Jack’s entire body.

He was going to throw up. He was going to _die_. Was he even breathing anymore? He couldn’t tell, his bones were vibrating so violently and then there was a hand fisting in his hoodie and the spirit couldn’t even _fight_ as he was dragged from the seat and forced to stand on his own two feet.

His lower back hit the edge of the table and then darkness filled his vision, a looming terrible darkness and Jack’s face was being forced up, up until he saw two rings of gold and he started drowning.

“When you ask me like that,” the Nightmare King snarled, hand clenching on Jack’s jaw, “fucking you is the _last_ thing I want to do. Do not take me for a fool because I _know_ it’s the last thing you want as well.”

Jack’s eyes grew hopelessly wide, terrifyingly wide, and Pitch let go of him roughly. “I may not be as strong as I once was, but I am not _blind_ to the fear you feel when you ask me things like _that_ out of anger.”

Pitch took an angry step away from Jack, pulling his fingers though his hair in fury. The sudden space between them filled Jack’s veins with a cold that quickly transformed into guilt, into regret and frustration and _fear_ , and the frost spirit’s heart quickened in panic. He stumbled forward, to stop Pitch from _leaving_ , but the glare the Nightmare King turned onto him had his legs turning to lead.

“You called me out on manipulating you,” Pitch said flatly, his eyes positively _burning_ , “so have some fucking courtesy, especially since you had the nerve to tell me to stop cross-analysing everything you say.”

Jack’s throat tightened; if he hadn’t been breathing before, he definitely wasn’t anymore. “Pitch –”

“I’m done here,” the man spat. “You’re twisted and trying my patience and I need to _hunt_ for more fear before I deal with you again.”

And then he stalked away from Jack, away and down the stairs and Jack’s legs wobbled for the last time before giving out altogether.

_Well, that’s him dealt with._

“No,” Jack sobbed, fingers at his throat as he tried to _breathe_. “No _no_.”

On his knees on the dry floor, Jack’s mind sang in sick pleasure and his heart _ached_. With a horrible start he realised that he could _feel_ the awful tearing happening inside of him, between the absurd _hatred_ and the desperately pathetic _need_.

_You mean between being smart and stupid._

“No I don’t,” he growled, and he coughed, choking on his own breath as a painful sting shot through his lungs.

He wanted Pitch to come back. He wanted to tell the man that he didn’t mean anything he’d said, that he didn’t want to fight with the king.

But the Nightmare King never came back up those stairs, and even if he had Jack didn’t think he’d be able to open his mouth and even get out the words he wanted to say.

The hollow ache burst back into blistering life again in Jack’s torso.

It wasn’t long before a low whistle sliced through Jack’s convoluted misery, and the frost spirit looked up to see Skreek and Phoenix emerge from the staircase. They were both giving him weird looks as they approached, and Jack must have been a pretty fucking pathetic sight for Phoenix to shuffle his two wine bottles into one arm and offer his hand for Jack to get up.

Jack took the burning hand, because he probably wouldn’t be able to get off the floor any other way, and Skreek said, “For someone who pinched such a great table, you’re looking pretty gloomy, Jack boy.”

Yeah, well.

“I think I’m gonna just –”

“Skreek has a job for you,” Phoenix interrupted, placing his bottles of stolen wine onto the table. As Jack was about to protest, because he seriously did not feel up to human interaction at the moment, Phoenix hooked an arm around Jack’s neck and brought the spirit’s face close to him so he could rumble a warning, “So don’t even think about fucking off.”

Jack just looked at Phoenix’s determined face for a moment, before his shoulders sagged and he grumbled, dejectedly, “I’m not that easy to read.”

“You are, shithead.”

Phoenix untangled himself from Jack and reached for his wine bottles as he melted a patch of Jack’s victory snow and sat his ass down. Jack sighed and looked warily over to Skreek on the other side of the table. The werewolf was already at home amongst the snow, his leg propped up across the seat. “What do you want from me, Skreek? And where did Yves go?”

Skreek waved a hand out toward the rest of the tavern. “Yves volunteered to sus out the second floor to make sure we didn’t come all this way to walk into some Imperial trap. He managed to snag Pitch as the bloke was trying to leave, so try and look a little less down.”

How was that meant cheer Jack up? Making Pitch stay in this place was probably just gonna make him madder. But, swallowing his bitterness, Jack ignored Skreek and knelt down to pick up his discarded staff. He never knew what to do with his hands when he wasn’t hanging onto it.

A large boot suddenly pressed into the wood, and Jack scowled up at Phoenix. “You guys fight again?” the fire spirit asked with a knowing, damning look in his eyes and his teeth clamped around a cork.

Jack narrowed his eyes at the fire spirit, and with a blast of ice got the boot off his staff. He straightened up and dusted Phoenix’s invisible boot print off his precious piece of warped wood as the two spirits stared each other down.

“Cat got your tongue?” the fire spirit poked.

Jack nearly laughed at that. A cat definitely had his tongue, and it was one he couldn’t even get his hands on to pry off.

A throat was cleared across the table, redirecting Jack’s attention back to the werewolf and a grumbling Phoenix back to his still-corked wine bottle. “As for the first question…”

Jack had enough cognitive function to brace himself for the werewolf’s next words. Not only was the wolf not wearing a tie this evening, but he had a glint in his eyes that promised horridly immoral things.

But whatever Skreek had in store for him… it would give Jack purpose, and purpose was always an excellent way to keep his shit relatively together.

“…we’re whoring you out for the sake of business.”

Or maybe not.

Jack’s eyes popped wide and, regaining a piece of himself, balked, “You’re _what_?”

He prayed, to his holy idol Yves, that hadn’t heard Skreek right. That the slitted glare Phoenix was currently sporting was not because of the absurd suggestion that had just left Skreek’s mouth.

But no, apparently being around Skreek was as dangerous as it was obscene because the werewolf just rolled his eyes at all the looks he was being given and said, “It’s for _business_ , Jack. Nothing personal at all. In fact, if it was me, I’d be asking for Phoenix instead. Got more meat on his bones.”

Phoenix dropped the wine bottle he was trying to uncork. “What the fuck are you saying?” he spluttered as a dusting of violent blush peeled across his cheeks.

Jack’s eyes narrowed, the lie about Skreek’s preference such a blatant one, especially since an hour hadn’t even passed yet since the werewolf’s eyebrows had revealed an incriminating secret about their master. Setting his staff on the ground, he planted a stony look on the werewolf. “Who are you trying to whore me out to?”

An evil smirk appeared on Skreek’s face, and without looking, he cocked a thumb over the balcony. “That pretty little thing of a barman.”

Frowning, Jack leaned forward and peered over the railing and down at the bar. The bar itself, still lined with patrons, was long and straight except for a curve on the far left side that doubled back on itself. The bartenders, or the three that Jack could spot, stayed clear of this corner as they worked up and down the bar area, throwing drinks and snatching money out of people’s hands. Just as Jack was about to ask which of them he was apparently being offered to, a head of black-blue hair and a smiling face emerged from the bar’s curve, and Jack’s frown evaporated.

“Shit,” he breathed.

He could feel Skreek’s grin without even having to look over at the wolf. “You see ‘im?”

“Yeah I see him,” Jack croaked.

He’d also abruptly remembered _why_ he’d thought the tavern felt familiar when he’d stepped into the place.

“What, he’s not that bad looking,” Skreek commented, sounding disappointed at Jack’s reaction. “What do you think Phoenix?”

But Phoenix, with his teeth still clamped around a cork, had caught onto the situation entirely too quickly, and Jack didn’t know whether that said volumes of filth about _his_ character or Phoenix’s. Barking out a laugh, he said, “I think Frost’s already flexed his charm on the faerie.”

Skreek gasped, scandalized at the news. Jack watched, pained and embarrassed, as the werewolf squinted down at the faerie with a newfound interest. “You rascal, Jack.”

Phoenix laughed harder, annoying and loud, and Jack tried his hardest to remain steadfast despite the embarrassment crawling up his neck. “He probably just wants to laugh at me for joining the Guardians,” he said, biting the words at Phoenix in particular.

Skreek snorted. “I don’t know, Jack. Should have seen the way his eyes lit up when they spotted you.”

“He’s probably impatient to have another round of the best lay of his life,” Phoenix purred.

Jack had something to snap about that, something cruel, but a split second before he could utter it he quickly clamped a hand over his mouth.

He couldn’t deal with another fight today.

Skreek and Phoenix seemed to deflate a little when Jack had no comeback in store for them, and the frost spirit watched them exchange a look briefly. But before Jack could say anything in his own defence, the werewolf was waving him off with one of his more cunning smiles. “Go on, then. He’s the only reason Yves and Pitch could get past those burly monsters guarding the stairwell, and he said he’d sic them on us if he didn’t get to see you, so make it quick.” The werewolf winked at Jack, all evil and no finesse.

With absolutely no sincerity, Jack deadpanned, “Thanks Skreek.”

“You are imperative to this mission, young Jack! A cornerstone of our operation, a pioneer aboard our vessel! Also, would ya get me a drink while you’re down there?” Skreek called as Jack, chuckling a little at the wolf’s extravagance, was already headed for the stairs. “Unless Phoenix is kind enough to share some of his.”

“So fucking help me, Skre – _ouch!_ ”

Jack just rolled his eyes as he left.

Down at the bar, most of the workers moved like lightning to get their customers drinks or food and throw them off the barstools to make room for more money-offering patrons. But on the curved corner of the bar, the barman who specialised in cocktails and the most expensive booze the tavern had in stock was languidly running a finger down the front of a man’s shirt as he twirled his carving knife in his other hand.

The black-blue hair that hung down near his shoulders was slicked back for work, but whatever neat picture it was meant to create was ruined by the navy feathers that refused to be subdued by gel. A string of beads was hanging down in his face, brushing against the small, pale feathers on his cheekbones whenever he tilted his head and laughed.

_Always such a flirt_ , Jack thought as he carved his way through the last of the criminals between him and his target’s workstation.

The barman smiled suddenly at the goon he was chatting up, a beam of angelic warmth that nearly had the already starry-eyed guy tipping back in his seat. Brown eyes, an identical shade to the bark of the Oak of Sorrows in which the faerie lived, slid sideways and locked onto Jack’s approaching figure.

Then the barman leaned forward over the bar to whisper something to his victim. In an instant, the man was on his feet and he had grabbed the guy sitting in the corner and landed a punch square in the startled drunk’s face. There was yelling and a brief scuffle, before the second guy had the first in a headlock and was dragging him off.

And, oh look, there was suddenly a free spot at the bar.

“Little shit,” Jack muttered with the beginnings of a smirk.

Keeping his eyes on the faerie, who was still smiling to himself as the quite large knife in his right hand twirled and twirled without once nicking the guy, Jack sidled up to the newly freed seats and took the one against the wall. His back against the stone behind him, he stretched out his legs the second another faerie thought to take the seat next to him and box him into the corner.

Jack and the feet he had on the barstool beside him were glared at for a solid few seconds before the barman waved the faerie on with the knife. “You can’t afford anything around here anyway, ugly.”

Jack snorted as the faerie, no doubt broken-hearted from being disregarded by the prettiest barman in the joint, slinked back off into the tavern. Jack’s eyes flickered to the pretty barman in question. “They’re still letting you work here when you’ve got a mouth like that, Ren?”

Ren’s angelic smile twisted, turning exaggerated and indulging as he stabbed his knife into the bar top. “It’s called charm, Jack. Not that you’d know anything about that.”

“Liar. I’m plenty charming and you know it.”

“Is that how you managed to get a job as a Guardian?”

Jack’s grip on his staff tightened up. Trying on an easy smile, he knocked his head back against the stone behind him and said, “Nah, got that coz I was the hopscotch master of ’58.”

Ren’s eyes rolled back into his head as he grabbed an unopened bottle from a collection near the sink behind him and started wiping blood off it. “What, you only won the title once? That doesn’t sound very impressive.”

“Hey! ’58 was an important year for hopscotch. The competition was out-of-this-world brutal. There was this one chick –”

“You’re ridiculous,” Ren interrupted with a pained groan. “How did someone as good looking as you get stuck with your personality.”

_And there goes my attempt at easy banter_ , Jack thought as his smile sharpened. “Ditto.”

Ren’s eyes narrowed for a moment before he abruptly swept a look over Jack and playfully said, “I spy with my little eye, something starting with a set of gruesome hickies on the side of your neck. You finally find a new toy to have fun with?”

Jack’s hand snapped up to the marks on his skin, and Ren laughed at him.

Nails digging into flesh and tendon, Jack threw back, “Maybe I did,” and Ren’s laughter turned a little sour.

It wasn’t exactly a lie, not entirely. But it still felt like one on his tongue. Sex with Ren wasn’t exactly what he’d call “fun”. It was entertaining and distracting and Jack always seemed to end up with scratches in places he didn’t even know nails could leave marks, but it was never fun. Not the kind of fun he was meant to be brandishing.

Not any kind, really.

And he didn’t really think the bone-melting sensation of having Pitch grope and tongue his way into Jack’s mouth was what he could consider to be “fun” either. It was too intense to brush off so lightly, too shattering to try and process what he felt during it let alone categorise it.

It was scary and overwhelming, but he wanted Pitch to kiss him again so badly. They’d only done it properly once and Jack was pretty certain he could get hooked on it so easily, would _do_ anything just so it wouldn’t end….

_“And if I wanted you to lay this world to waste for me?”_

…which was pretty dangerous, now that Jack considered it.

But it was a desire he was just gonna have to strangle, wasn’t it, since the man couldn’t even stand to be around him now.

_I remember fucking this guy_ , his thoughts suddenly mentioned.

Jack tensed. He dragged himself out of his Pitch-orientated sulking as Ren set his bottle aside for a moment to take an order out to a table (which he did so with numerous grumbled curses). Jack’s thoughts began to churn, to murmur and hiss and he set his elbows on the bar so he could hold head in his hands and just _hold on_.

_The first time, we had him moaning against a bathroom wall and_ damn _it was a good job,_ the thoughts hummed. _But you felt so sad afterwards, didn’t you? So empty. He didn’t even think it was weird that you didn’t kiss him. And then you came back and did it again._

Jack groaned into his hands, and his thoughts added, _Do you think if you let Pitch touch you – ha, not that he’ll come_ near _you again – it’ll be any different? People aren’t as messed up as you. Sticking your tongue in another mouth doesn’t have meaning, just like that fuck had no meaning. Just because_ he _–_

Jack made an aborted noise, a noise that would have come straight from his heart if the organ was capable of such a feat, and he hissed, “Stop stop stop _stop_.”

The spirit abruptly got smacked in the shoulder, and with a start he looked up and saw Ren glaring at him. “Jack what the fuck’s wrong with you? You sick?”

The frost spirit swallowed, shook his head, and Ren made a disbelieving noise. “You need a drink? It might help.”

With another shake of his head, he mumbled, “I hate the smell of alcohol.”

Ren sighed, heavy and loud and annoyed. “Then why are you in a tavern? Because I know you’re not here to see me.”

Jack looked down at the bar and scrubbed his fingers over his face. When Jack didn’t immediately give him an answer, Ren pushed him and asked, “What do your weirdo mates need the alchemist for?”

Yeah, like he was gonna go into that shit here. “Secret werewolf business.”

“Does it have something to do with why your name is on the list the Imperials have?”

Jack stilled. Dropping his hands, he met Ren’s probing look. _Of course_ Ren knew about one of Jack’s most recent crisis points. If the Imperials hadn’t already waved the list around the entire damn universe, then the fact that Ren was an aristocrat from one of the more bizarre faerie tribes – a tribe that specialised in espionage and intelligence gathering – would have guaranteed the faerie was in on the latest gossip.

The Nods were strange but they were very good at what they did – and when Jack remembered as much, he found that he was a little surprised that Ren didn’t already _know_ why they needed the alchemist.

He nearly sighed himself. Well, might as well make the most of a shitty conversation, right?

Pressing his tongue against the cut on his lip, Jack asked, “What do you know about all that? I don’t…it doesn’t make sense to me, why they’re so upset over the Holomire not letting them in.”

Ren stared Jack down for a moment before he glanced around and, leaning in toward the spirit, said in a low voice, “An Imperial embassy gets let in to the realm every two hundred years to renew the accords between the Holomire and the Imperials and keep everyone on friendly terms. This time, the Holomire didn’t so much as answer the door to tell them to fuck off.”

A waitress in a chainmail dress (very savvy attire, considering where she worked) gathered a mesh bag of apples from Ren’s stash of cocktail fruit and proceeded to smack a rude customer off his stool with them further down the bar.

There was an uproar of laughter from the customer’s companions, and Ren snickered as the blank-faced waitress handed him back his apples.

But Jack was less than interested in whatever chaos was happening on the other side of the tavern, because as soon as the customer had toppled, drink and all, to the floor, Jack caught a familiar dark figure emerge from the stairway just off to his right. A sick feeling pinched at him as he watched Pitch growl at the guards protecting the stairway, before storming through the main floor of the tavern and back toward where Skreek and Phoenix were sitting.

Jack drew one of his legs closer and buried his face in his knee as a terrible anguish constricted his stomach. _He hates me. He’s not even_ looking _at me anymore fuck he hates me so much I can’t –_

Pitch’s shoulders tightened a little, and Jack’s breath hitched when the man cast a single dark look over his shoulder, right at the frost spirit. Not a moment passed before he continued on his warpath, never again looking back, and Jack wanted to just _bury_ himself –

“Hey, douchebag, we’re having a conversation here.”

Reluctantly, and miserably, Jack glanced back to the impatient Ren. He could barely remember what they’d been talking about – or why it was even important when Pitch was glaring a hole in the world and Jack hadn’t even _meant_ to make him _mad_ – but then something, somewhere in his brain reminded him of the other problems he was dealing with other than Pitch.

_I’m tired_ , he silently uttered, and his thoughts hummed in reply.

Eventually, he managed, “I still don’t get why the Imperials are throwing a tantrum over it.”

A second later, he wished he’d just kept his mouth shut, because Ren gave him a _look_ that was so condescending Jack felt as if the holy ghost of E. Aster Bunnymund had joined in on their conversation. “They _always_ get let in, Jack. Even the year the Holomire refused to sign the accords and threatened to cannibalise the ambassadors if they didn’t leave. They always allow the embassy to at least pass through the wards just so they can remind the Imperials of what they’ll never completely control. It’s….”

Ren was quiet for a moment, his brows pulling together. Jack watched him struggle until Ren seemed, with a start, to realise what he was thinking and quickly shake himself out of it. He turned a mocking look onto Jack. “I don’t expect an outsider like you to understand warrior tribe politics. But from the Imperials’ point of view, not opening the door is the equivalent of insurrection against their authority. Have you seen all those rebels on the streets out there? They’re stirring up shit again because they heard the Holomire are ignoring the Imperials. The Court wants the forest open to them before the rebels get enough support to stage an actual revolution.”

Jack supposed that seemed like a decent enough reason to nag every person they came across for answers. “But… if the Holomire were only ever letting the Imperials in for their own sake, and they even had the power to say no to the accords, then why did they stop?”

Ren’s eyes sharpened. “That’s what everyone wants to know.”

Jack didn’t like one bit of that look. There was an accusation in Ren’s eyes, one that Jack had seen too much of already. “The Imperials told us that we were the last people who ever visited the Holomire.”

Ren’s eyes dropped to the bottle in his hand. “You were also the last to ever leave. There was a reason my tribe greeted you with spears when you first met us.”

Jack had to laugh a little at that. So this was the reason why Ren wanted to talk to him? To slap another guilty sticker on Jack’s forehead?

Off to his right, Jack spotted Skreek headed his way, presumably to head up and join Yves. With a grin, the werewolf bustled up to Jack and did a downright fantastic job of completely ruining Jack’s hair with his large palm before bounding off with more oomph than a giant werewolf with a fake leg should’ve had.

He smiled a little at the affection as the wolf hurried off, but the second he turned back to Ren, and the freshly polished bottle the faerie was re-shelving behind him, the smile waned. “So you think something has happened to them,” he muttered, the statement bland and not at all a question.

Ren turned back to him, seemed to take note of Jack’s dead tone, and shrugged. “Why else would they stop listening to the outside world altogether? Unless they _couldn’t_.”

Jack’s jaw clenched. “It wasn’t us,” he gritted out.

The faerie’s half-feathered brows drew together. “Their list is getting shorter, Jack. I have Nods watching the Imperials and they’re constantly crossing names off because the people they’re looking for have been missing since the day of that conference a hundred and fifty years ago.”

“That doesn’t mean it was us,” Jack argued.

Ren’s expression hardened. “We saw you and your party. We saw the six of you enter the realm, along with the rest of the warlords. And out of everyone who entered the realm that day, only four left. Two of your guys on the first day, and you and your fire breathing freak two days later. That’s it. There’s been radio silence from the Holomire forest ever since.”

Jack’s throat abruptly closed.

…What?

_No_.

No, that couldn’t be. Because Jack _knew_. He remembered leaving on the first day of the conference, after they’d been escorted out of the shrine and dumped at the forest’s entrance. He remembered standing underneath the shiny portal and –

Jack’s chest constricted, his lungs tightening. Nausea began to roll in his stomach. “I – that’s not what I –”

Ren growled at him. “You’re a piece of shit, Jack. I know that. I’ve always known that. But at least have the decency to own up to –”

There were fingers at his throat, trying to claw into his windpipe so he could breathe and _think_. “We didn’t do anything to them.”

Ren grabbed Jack’s hand off his throat and the frost spirit choked a little as talons sank into the flesh of his palm. Ren’s hand had mutated, feathers had sprouted from his usually clear skin and there were hooks in Jack’s hand and it was _burning_. It had been such a long time since he’d seen this side of a Nod’s nature, and even then –

“They were good people,” Ren spat, and blood and scorching pain welled in Jack’s palm. “Strange people but _good_ people and you can’t just keep fucking _lying_ –”

“I’M NOT LYING!” he cried. He tried to pull his hand back but Ren wouldn’t let him go. Jack didn’t even think the Nod had noticed how much blood was dripping between them.

“Then you’re in denial,” the faerie snapped back. “Because we _saw_ you Jack.”

No. No, _Ren_ was the one who was lying. He must have been. Because Jack _knew_ what had happened during that conference. How could his own memories lie to him? They were the only things that didn’t lie. Even when he wanted them to they –

And then he remembered Phoenix, sitting broken on the lounge that very morning, asking Jack to give him a minute alone with the others.

He remembered tiny voices, a ball frosting over, and soft leaves under his feet. _“Jack! Help us, Jack.”_

He remembered Phoenix’s voice, distant and panicked and angry. _“Open your eyes, Frost. You can’t hide from this.”_

Ren’s talons abruptly let Jack go, and the spirit’s hand flopped uselessly onto the bar. “Ugh. Fucking nightmare freak. Hey, is he the one –”

He remembered a forest, still and white and dead and something revolting shifted in Jack’s stomach, rising threateningly. Falling off his seat, Jack clamped a hand over his face and scrambled for the bathroom at the back of the bar.

He barely made it through the rotten doorway and to the nearest sink before he threw up a fistful of gold into the stained porcelain. Like the night before, the gold had no taste, no sensation other than its visual presence and the disgustingly unsettled feeling it left in Jack’s body. His arms shaking as his fingers clutched the sink, he heaved one last time, spat clear spit into the sink, and watched with an erratic heartbeat as the gold began to shimmer and peel out of the sink.

“What the hell,” he whispered, his voice trembling as violently as his body. “What the HELL? You said you were through with me!”

_Through with helping you. Now I’m just here for the shitshow._

Jack pried his fingers off the porcelain so he could fist them in his hair, heedless of the blood he was smearing over his skin. “You were never any help in the first place!” he snarled. “And now everyone thinks I’m weird and Pitch – he…” Jack shuddered and his voice fell away into a hoarse mumble as he accused, “You’re the reason he hates me.”

_No, you did that all by yourself._

His eyes widened, horrified, and his heart clenched so painfully. “You’re wrong. It’s your fault!”

Everyone else in the bathroom was making a hasty retreat to get the hell away from the screaming kid pacing like a madman up and down the tilted floor, and Jack didn’t even notice them as they tripped and stumbled over the clumps of sharp ice he was creating in his distress.

“I need to get rid of you,” he suddenly realised, and began looking around the bathroom for something useful.

_Like that’s going to solve anything._

Cubicles? The wood was falling apart, they were useless. Toilets? Ha, wouldn’t it be great if he could just detach his head and flush it down there. The tiled wall looked pretty tough, but so did the mirrors…“I’m trying to make something work here and you keep messing it up.”

_I wouldn’t have to if you weren’t stupid enough to pick HIM of all people to fuck around with! WHY does it have to be HIM?!_

“I don’t owe you anything,” Jack growled in reply. “The decisions I want to make are mine. They’re _mine_!”

_Just like that Nightmare made of out ice?_

At once, Jack’s heart stopped dead in his chest. Without thinking, without breathing, without so much as letting himself register what his mind had said, he turned back for the mirror above the sink he’d thrown up in.

_Oh so it is – wait, what are you doing? No, wait STOP –_


	18. Resuscitation (Part II)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Pitch and Yves get stalked by a wall-eating bug, Phoenix's story of what happened in the Holomire forest is revealed, and the Nightmare King finally sets a match to some of his anti-social tendencies.

“I have fantastic news, gloomy Pitch.”

The Nightmare King’s furious eyes settled onto the king standing between him and his freedom – his freedom from this abode of savages, from the fucking frost spirit he’d left by their table – and it took every ounce of civility Pitch owned not to _growl_.

“I’m not interested in any news,” he stated, attempting to sidestep Yves only to have the man block his path once again. “Get out of my way.”

“Why are you in such a hurry?”

Why were these people so _persistent_?!

The Halloween King’s head tipped, as if he was evaluating Pitch from a slightly different angle, and Pitch held his stare with only partially restrained venom. He had yet to decide whether he hated Yves or not – the king was obviously a tour de force who would be indispensible in a battle, and Pitch was always surprised to find similarities between the two of them. But there were so many oddities about the man, and he was always left jarred by the cackling suit-wearing cook who appreciated creepy monsters and had enough space in his realm to house an army as large as the ones Pitch used to lead.

Not to mention the fact that Pitch had yet to see an iota of fear on the man.

_What_ is _he?_ Pitch thought scathingly, and the darkening of his expression prompted Yves’s gaze to sharpen significantly. The king’s dark amber eyes were mining a ferociously deep hole in Pitch’s hide, and Pitch was not in a stable enough mood to deal with being so annoyingly detained.

_And it’s all because of the damn frost spirit._

When he’d realised, on the night of Halloween, that Jack was more complicated than he had ever realised, he hadn’t anticipated this level of _twisted_. It reminded entirely too much of dealing with the psychopaths of his past, and as much as he was perfectly capable of handling something like that again, he didn’t fucking _want_ to.

And Jack had promised him that he wouldn’t have to, hadn’t he? He’d said that he wasn’t anything like the bastard villains Pitch had had to fraternize with.

_But you are, Jack. You are and you won’t even open up your bloody mouth to fix it._

Yves was still staring at him, boring into him. If he kept digging the king would soon enough reach Pitch’s internal organs, and wouldn’t that just make more of a mess of the already vile tavern floor. “You wish to go hunting?”

“ _Yes_ ,” Pitch hissed, fists clenching. A snickering sound came from near Pitch’s feet, and the Nightmare King looked down and saw some strange fae garbage crawling its way toward Pitch’s shoes. Clearly drunk, probably egged on by some obscene bet. Teetering off the edge of his last straw, Pitch shoved his boot in the drunk’s shoulder and booted the fool onto his back. He drew up shadows from the floorboards, from behind nearby barrels, and wrapped them around the man’s limbs.

The shadows dragged him, kicking and laughing, off to some dark corner of the tavern and out of Pitch’s sight.

“Even though you have already been?” Yves said, and Pitch glared back down at the king’s steely stare. “Pitch Black, not even you can blatantly terrorise any part of the empire without the Imperials finding out and causing trouble for us all. So bottle your rage and find an alternative outlet for it later.”

Pitch gritted his teeth. _I am a king as well_ , he thought, his pride swelling with rage. _Kings do not take commands from other kings._

The Nightmare King pinched the bridge of his nose and took a deep breath. Yes, kings did not take commands from other kings, but the particular ruler standing in front of Pitch looked like he wasn’t going to let him leave without a fight.

_And he can take on a dozen wolves without even getting scratched_ , the rational side of Pitch’s brain reminded him.

“Now, would you like to hear my news?”

Pitch opened his eyes and narrowed them when he saw the evil written across Yves’s face. “What is it?” he grunted.

Yves smiled, biting and not at all nice. “The alchemist does not need an appointment to see him. Apparently if we are spooky enough we can walk right in. Somehow I do not think we will have a problem in that department. Oh, and you have some ice on your clothes.”

Pitch looked down at his shirt and his brows lowered when he saw the furls of frost still clinging to the material of his shirt, refusing to let go. He dragged fingers through the ice, collecting it, discarding it, telling himself to _forget about it_. As the icy water dripped from the ends of his fingers Yves began leading – corralling, really, like one would a stray _sheep_ – Pitch toward the other side of the tavern. Drying his cold fingers on his coat, the Nightmare King muttered, “Shouldn’t Skreeklavic be coming with us?”

“I do not want to send him upstairs if there are Imperials around. This place is too cramped for him to change into his wolf form and fight.”

_How thoughtful_. “And you can’t go by yourself?”

Another smile, this one as sharp as a knife. “I wish for company.”

_Rubbish_ , Pitch thought as he pointedly kept his gaze turned down from the loft area.

The stairwell to the second floor was being guarded by two colossally tall suits wearing dead expressions and covered, it seemed, in tattoos Pitch distantly recognised as the markings a particular faerie tribe slapped on their criminals. Yves sized the two of them up, cracking his neck as he tipped his head back to meet their eyes, and Pitch hung back in case the other king planned on carving these faeries up like one of his roasts.

“Hey, cocksuckers, they’ve got a free pass.”

Pitch glanced toward the bar and saw the barman, a tiny feather-sprouting thing, stab a knife in his direction. With an abundance of reluctance, the two guards shifted aside, if only slightly, and after a moment of sharing an odd look with the barman, Pitch followed Yves up the creaking stairway.

The ‘overnight’ area of the tavern was the equivalent of a maze, with a fracturing hallway lined with broken bottles and wood that was warping off the walls. The ceilings were low, too low – all Pitch had to do was stand on his toes and his hair would brush against the spazzing lights, it was _that low_. And he couldn’t even stretch out his arms, the hallway was so tight.

_Skreeklavic’s wolf form definitely would not fit up here_ , Pitch thought as he surveyed his surroundings in distaste. _Neither would Jack’s claustrophobia._

A moment later, Pitch scrubbed a frustrated hand over his face. He needed to shut Jack out of his head until he calmed down enough to think about the spirit rationally – until he could swallow this itch he had to walk right out of this group of villains and return to his quiet, simple life of not giving a shit about anyone but himself. This world was a wretched place, it was cruel and so was he and he had to look after _himself_ first.

And he could do as much, even while he worked for Skreeklavic. He _could_. But he just had to disentangle himself from Jack’s mood swings first. Before they started affecting _him_.

Taking another breath, Pitch asked, “Which room is the alchemist in?”

“The door beside a flickering lampshade,” was Yves’s reply. Pitch raised a brow at the directions, and Yves smirked. “Vague, yes, but it is more dependable than these numbers.” He ran long, bony fingers over the metal number of the door by his arm, and the entire thing came off and disintegrated in the king’s hand.

_Excellent. Now all I need is for the roof to cave in, and my night will be complete._

Yves cast a look back to him as they inspected the hallways. “You are angry.”

Pitch tried not to roll his eyes at the attempt at small talk. “You realised as much earlier.”

“Is it because of bony Jack?”

He sighed. “Why are you asking me when you already know?”

Without even _blinking_ at Pitch’s bait, Yves asked dryly, “Would you like advice, Pitch?”

“No,” was his immediate and blunt reply.

He didn’t want _advice_. He wanted to crack Jack’s head open and understand what the hell was happening in there when he said one thing while his fear was screaming another. When he turned, so _quickly_ , from being putty in Pitch’s hands to tearing his nails down Pitch’s wrists and snarling at him.

The Nightmare King fingered the welts on the backs of his hands and tried to tell himself that this just proved how fruitless this _whatever_ between him and Jack was. How worthless his efforts had been to try and get through to the spirit, how much more content he would be if he had just kept his inclination to know _more_ to himself.

But the sentiment was a hollow one. The dogma Pitch survived by was decaying and it made him want to walk right back out into the tavern and…

_…and do something which is the complete_ opposite _of trying to keep him out of my head_ , Pitch thought bitterly.

“Pitch,” Yves said, and the Nightmare King’s hands jolted apart. He looked at Yves and, to his annoyance, saw a determined look on the man’s face. “Understand that our Jack does not love himself as much as he should. He is very, very good at burying things that hurt him. It is unhealthy, and he undoubtedly suffers because of it, but it is how he copes.”

He didn’t need to hear this. He didn’t need any more of a reason to give a crap. “I don’t –”

“You look at him as if you cannot figure him out,” Yves interrupted. “You cannot be easily put off if you wish to try.”

Just how much did this guy _notice_? And _how_? Pitch’s face was far from a canvas of emotion and thought – he’d been told by Inari more than once that he was “vexingly unreadable” – and even if it was, even if he stared at Jack with every one of his conflicting thoughts on his brow, he was never stupid enough to do it where everyone else would notice.

Where forces of nature like the king in front of him could sense his wavering _everything_.

Where did Yves even come from? Why was he so strong yet so secluded, with no ambitions like Skreeklavic or Pitch himself?

And how could he just stand there and say such useless stuff straight to Pitch’s face with so much damn confidence?

“You’re imagining things,” Pitch replied, kicking a broken bottle down a dark corridor off to his right. “I look at Jack with the eyes of someone wholly uninterested by his problems. Nothing more.”

“What a nice lie.”

Pitch could feel the growl from earlier rising in his throat.

Yves stopped outside a door that was blocked up with rusted metal beams and some crime scene tape, like the kind the humans tied up gruesome murder scenes with. He pinned Pitch with a harsh stare. “What do you have to gain by denying the fact?”

His pride? His dignity? A shred of his resolve to remain as a dishonourable villainous presence in this world?!

Pitch’s fingers bit at the palms of his hands, and he buried the frustrated limbs in his coat pockets. He had himself to gain, his own security, which kept getting put at risk whenever his eyes strayed to Jack. _Besides_ , Pitch thought, and opened his mouth to say, “I haven’t even been in his company for more than a week –”

A rude noise cut Pitch off mid-sentence, and the Nightmare King glared at Yves only to find the other man glaring right back at him. “I do not know what I know because of _time_ , Pitch Black. It is because I have _tried_ , and I was successful enough to know that whatever he thinks he is doing with you is a terrible idea.”

Throat running dry, Pitch found himself laughing, if just a little. It wasn’t a cheerful laugh, far from it, and his lip curled cynically. “Then why don’t you kick me out already. Stop trying to feed me and make me _leave_.”

Yves’s eyes tilted a little, as if he found something amusing in Pitch’s response. “What kind of a host would I be if I did that? I do not dislike you, Pitch. I have yet to make a sturdy judgement, though.”

Expression dying on his face, Pitch was thoroughly taken back by the admission. He probably shouldn’t have been, considering Yves was clearly skilled enough to slaughter his way through a wolf pack, and he hadn’t so much as touched a hair on Pitch’s head the previous night. But it was still an admission that Pitch had rarely been presented with – usually anyone one who met him loathed him right off the bat.

The king was weird, an overpowered oddball…but Pitch probably didn’t hate him.

Yves hadn’t tried to kill him yet, after all.

“Neither,” Pitch grudgingly admitted.

Yves smiled, as cold and cutting as usual and continued on down the hall. “Jack is the leader of his own life, he is entitled to make his own choices. Besides, you add diversity to our excessively large group.”

Pitch nearly snorted. “You dislike having so many people around.”

“I do. But they need the space, and it is currently unoccupied.”

_Currently unoccupied?_ Pitch thought, eyeing the other man as they breezed through the halls in search of a lampshade. _Does that mean you plan to fill those barracks and stables again one day? Or does the whole place just exist as the vacant skeleton of a dead army?_

Yves glanced at him, as if he could feel Pitch’s query. But the Nightmare King didn’t open his mouth to voice it, and the humanised Halloween King did not push for it to be asked.

They searched in silence for another few minutes, splitting up in the labyrinth of the tavern’s sleeping quarters, only to run into each other again with no sighting of a lampshade between them. It was ridiculous how large the second story was, how many rooms were vacant and destroyed, and how many more were missing altogether. Feeling a strange draft from beneath a door, Pitch had opened the thing only to find the entire room missing from the threshold onwards, as if an explosion had demolished the single unit. A faerie walking their hound across the street had looked over and waved at Pitch, and, grimacing, the Nightmare King had slammed the door shut and met up with Yves at the end of the hallway.

“This place is ridiculous,” Pitch muttered.

“It is a worthy place to hide in, though.” Yves pointed off toward his right. “This way. We have already searched down the other hallway. I think.”

_At least if we get hopelessly lost, I can just open the door to a destroyed room and walk right out onto the downtown streets._

“Hiding? Is that what the alchemist is doing in here?”

“Yes, from the Imperials. The alchemist manufactures potions that are highly illegal and very troublesome for the order-keepers of the empire. I suppose with the Imperials ransacking every business and home asking about the Holomire people, it would be troublesome if he were to be disturbed.”

Pitch’s mind caught hold of the name of the faerie tribe giving him even more reason to be irritated of late. He considered a question for a moment, considered whether it would be worth putting a voice to the matter, but in the end his curiosity won out and he said, lowly, “This business with the Holomire.”

Yves’s mouth quirked, unsurprised, as if he’d been _waiting_ for Pitch to ask. “You wish to know? Even though you left with Jack this morning?”

The Nightmare King scowled. “I –”

Before Pitch’s indignation could get the better of the conversation, Yves cackled to himself. “I jest, Pitch. Although this is information you must not pass on to Jack, lest Phoenix rains meteors down on our homes. I like my home, Pitch. I am sure you appreciate the state of yours, too.”

Although he rolled his eyes at the fire spirit’s threat, Pitch’s paranoia couldn’t help but imagine, for a moment, what a shower of space rocks would do to the state of his home. He was confident in his lair’s ability to survive a blast until he realised that at its highest point, the cavern was probably not ten feet under the earth.

Safe from the sunlight, but not a giant hurdling rock.

“I won’t say anything,” he grumbled.

“You are aware that one and a half centuries ago our spirits went for a conference in the Holomire forest,” Yves began. He cast a quick look down one of the empty turns of the hallway, and inclined his head for Pitch to follow him. “It was a meeting of ‘military nutcases’ as Phoenix phrased it, collected from various realms. The man Phoenix and Jack worked under was summoned, and they were all coerced to attend.”

_Military nutcases?_ Were those the warlords Jack had mentioned that morning? Pitch’s mind reeled, for just a few seconds. How on this _earth_ had the frost spirit of all people managed to get himself caught up with a bunch of militants?

And…he’d been employed by one too? Wait, hadn’t the smith said something about Jack being feared around that time?

Was…was Jack’s morally grey attitude a product of his frivolous apathy….or something else?

_“‘Oh, I don’t understand anything about you,_ Jack _, so why don’t you tell me the worst shit you’ve done and we’ll bond over it’.”_

Maybe Pitch had been asking for a lot more than he’d intended with his earlier question.

He forced the digression to sit and stay for now, though, and looked at Yves. “We didn’t make the cut, I take it?”

Yves shook his head, and with a wry smile, said, “That was the first thing Skreeklavic asked as well. Phoenix claimed that everyone who was invited was vile, so perhaps we possessed a few too many morals for their tastes.”

This time, Pitch didn’t even try to smother his snort.

“The formalities of the conference were over in a day and bony Jack believes they left the realm at its conclusion.”

Like he had said that morning. “But they didn’t,” Pitch assumed, and glared when he noticed a disgustingly large insect chewing on some drywall near his head.

“Two of their party members did. The rest, Jack and Phoenix included, did not. They were invited to remain for an extra two days, during which they were shown around the forest, introduced to people. They played with the children, as they would –” Yves rolled his eyes, and Pitch found himself smirking a little at their shared distaste of brats “– until the negotiations between the warlords and the Holomire King were complete.”

That sounded all well and good, but… “So why does Jack…” Yves cast him a look that couldn’t have been anything but grim, and realisation dawned on Pitch so swiftly and powerfully that his legs seized. “No…” he began to mutter.

Yves stopped as well, and slid his hands into the pockets of his suit pants as he looked back at Pitch. “The turnover of history is cruel, is it not? How it repeats itself.”

“What happened,” Pitch demanded.

The Halloween King’s eyes flickered up to the giant insect not-so-subtly following the two males, and in a tone that was a shade too clinical, even in Pitch’s opinion, said, “While Phoenix and Jack were in the forest with their children, they smelt smoke and returned to find the village in chaos. The Holomire were attacking each other, inhibitions lost, but these faeries were killing each other. They destroyed the warlords’ armies and all of their guests in their frenzy. Our spirits tried to save some, save the little ones they were with, but the portals were sealed and then the faeries turned on them.”

Pitch’s brows cut low in mild horror. “Was it the same thing that got to Skreeklavic’s wolves and North’s henchmen?”

Amber eyes met Pitch’s. “It sounds very much like it.”

Pitch shook his head in disbelief. This was ridiculous, this coincidence – as Yves had said, the obscene way history repeated itself. “If this is the reason why the Imperials are hunting them, why is Phoenix keeping this hidden? They’re spirits, they don’t have the power to send people into an insane frenzy. Not even the seasonal courts have that kind of power.”

_Or_ …

Or would the Imperials think that Jack and Phoenix were somehow at fault because they were the only ones who survived?

Pitch exhaled a quiet, bitter laugh. The Imperials would _definitely_ lock the spirits up on the very basis of surviving. And it would only make it worse that they seemed to be the only two people (well, Phoenix was, at least) who recognised the work of whatever caused this _change_ in people.

Pitch recalled, back in the wolf’s fortress, the look on Skreeklavic’s face when Phoenix and all his fear had run after Jack…after Jack had said what again? He dug through his memories for a moment and stilled when he realised it was something Jack had said to himself.

_“Why the hell would that be familiar?”_

And Pitch had seen, deep in the werewolf’s usually laughing eyes, that Skreeklavic had begun to _doubt_.

Yves made a small sound and, parroting Pitch’s own words back at him, said, “Why ask when you know the answer already?”

Pitch ran his fingers over the side of his face, then just let them do what they wanted and dig through his hair. “How did they escape?”

Yves shook his head. “Phoenix would not tell us.”

Pitch’s eyes narrowed. “And Jack’s memories?”

“The spirits were separated during the chaos, and I assume whatever happened to Jack during that time was what affected his memory. Phoenix said that Jack was not the same after that. Not for months. And when he finally returned to himself he could not remember anything from the point when they had been about to leave the forest on the first day.”

That…that was not good.

Fuck, this was so much more serious than Pitch had thought. The Imperials were going to come back for Jack and Phoenix eventually, their breakneck inquisition methods guaranteed the fact, and with the swordsman seeing right through even Jack’s reasoning – the reasoning of someone who had no conscious knowledge of what had happened – none of this was going to be pleasant.

And now they were all involved in this mess, weren’t they? Because whatever had destroyed the Holomire forest had come back for seconds and thirds and Pitch, Yves, Skreeklavic, North – _everyone_ was dealing with the aftermath of it.

But why now? Why a hundred and fifty years later? And why the North Pole and the Carpathian Mountains?

What did it _want_?

A sudden surge of light stung Pitch’s retinas, and he threw his hand in front of his face as Yves levelled an unflinching stare down the hallway. Through a gap in his fingers, Pitch narrowed his eyes at the sight of their notorious lampshade, flickering with some possessed intent for all of three seconds before it retreated back into its shadowed corner.

“Found it,” Pitch muttered, wincing away the white spots from his vision.

“Kings enter first,” Yves said with a smile, nodding toward the door the lampshade guarded. Pitch just shook his head at Yves, at the word games the king was subtly playing with him. Yves snickered at Pitch’s silence, and amended, “Then the king with the bigger boots.”

With a brief glance down at their footwear – and the dress shoes Yves would have had to sell arms and legs in _bundles_ to be able to afford – Pitch sighed and stalked up to the door.

With a concentrated kick, he slammed his boot into the rotting wood and rolled his shoulders in content when the entire slab fell in a mess of dust and mould spores into the room.

A trembling figure, in the middle of bitting into a whole lettuce, froze at the sight of the two figures in the doorway. Pitch swept one quick look over them – from the leaves and twigs sprouting from their head, the beard full of grass and even _more_ leaves, to the overly large emerald cloak and was that _dirt_ all over the floor? – and labelled this weirdo as one of the weirdest he had met thus far.

“Who are you?” the tree person blubbered, thick wooden teeth chattering as they raising the lettuce as if it was going to do some good against the two kings inviting themselves into the room.

The room was an absolute mess – there were piles of soil all around the floor with plants sprouting out of the dirt, and elaborate glass equipment bubbling with different fluids lined the walls.

_The Emporium’s chemist would faint if he saw all of this._

Yves, with lethally sharp eyes set on the trembling person, said, “You are the alchemist, yes?” He strolled right up to the stump, and as the alchemist nodded their head in blatant terror, Yves took the lettuce from the weirdo’s spindly grasp and tossed it over his shoulder.

The lettuce landed in one of the fertile piles of dirt, and the alchemist made an alarmed noise. But they didn’t dare try to save whatever was growing in the dirt – not with a glaring Nightmare King and smiling Halloween King standing in the way.

Yves gestured toward the alchemist as he pulled out a dining chair and made himself comfortable. “We are customers. Please, sit. We just wished to make sure you did not have any unsavoury company up here.”

“Besides yourself,” Pitch added, a bite in his words. He smirked as whatever the alchemist had has legs gave out and they landed on the edge of an armchair.

Yves snickered, amused, and the twigs on the alchemist’s head crackled in what Pitch assumed to be displeasure. Yves looked up at Pitch. “Earlier, we offered bony Jack as a sacrifice to the barman for this meeting.”

Pitch’s smirk disappeared. “And?”

“You should check on him. And tell Skreek the kindly alchemist is ready to see him, if you would.”

Being told so transparently to tick off made Pitch’s pride rumble in irritation, and the Nightmare King had to take another breath through his nose to calm himself. Being in the very vicinity of Yves made his pride more angry than not, and if this job he was doing for Skreeklavic was going to last for a while, he was going to have to keep a lid on his raging pride lest he do something stupid.

Like he used to, back in his rage-blinded early years of being the Nightmare King.

_“Ah, but you are a king too, are you not, Pitch Black?”_

He was. _He was_. But with more pride than power… he was a poor excuse of one.

He cast a dark look at the alchemist, who with some upwind of confidence had begun to stare at Pitch strangely – it made Pitch want to just yank the twigs out from the top of the weirdo’s head – before flickering one last look to Yves. “I was just being used for my boots, wasn’t I?”

“I could lie,” Yves said with a cackle, and with a sigh Pitch breezed back out of the room and into the labyrinth of a hallway.

It took him several minutes and an unfortunate encounter with that forearm-sized bug to find his way back to the stairwell that descended into the noisy tavern, and another age and a half to convince the thugs guarding the stairs to split apart long enough for Pitch to squeeze through their barricade.

_Skreeklavic can deal with them himself_ , Pitch thought as he growled a sarcastic _thank you_ at the monsters as they finally let him through.

And of course, the first thing his periphery caught as soon as he was on the tavern floor was the frost spirit, back against the tavern wall with his feet propped on the stool next to him as jeering and laughter exploded from down the bar.

Icy eyes fluttered to him almost immediately, and Pitch forced himself to ignore them as he elbowed and cut his way toward Skreeklavic. He had to, because if he let himself get caught up in those damn eyes again –

Then he felt it.

_Fear_.

Gritting his teeth, he looked back over his shoulder and his fists clenched when he saw Jack staring at him, one leg drawn up to hide his mouth, while his eyes fixed with such crushing desolation right on Pitch’s figure.

_You’re the one who started this fight_ , Pitch silently snarled, turning away before he could be tempted to do something unspeakable. _Stop looking so miserable._

Another thought, a bitter one. _Stop making me_ care _._

The gossiping of Skreeklavic and the fire spirit could be heard from the base of their rickety stairway, and as Pitch silently trekked his way up the stairs, trying to shove Jack’s wretched expression into the back of his mind as he went, he realised belatedly who the two were bitching about.

“…did they even get on that topic? Isn’t Frost meant to be down there seducing the guy? And what’s with those fucking feathers, who does he think he is.”

“When I said we were whoring him out, I didn’t mean it literally, brat. What do you take me for?”

“Uh, a villain?”

A loud scoff. “I am a perfect gentleman, Phoenix.”

Pitch emerged from the stairs just as Phoenix erupted into obnoxious laughter.

“Pitch,” Skreeklavic whined, “my honour is being slandered.”

“What honour?” Pitch muttered without thinking.

Skreeklavic was wide-eyed and silent for all of one second before he slammed a hand down on the table and hooted a loud laugh. “Ha!” Wiping a tear from his eye, he pulled his face into a mock glare. “That’s mean, Pitch. You should watch your back. I’m going to steal your potatoes one day, as the ultimate act of vengeance. You’ll be left bereft, hopeless, squandering in the abyss of despair and at your darkest hour I will arrive and drag you from your misery and you will be forced to acknowledge my everlasting –”

As Skreeklavic prattled on, Pitch’s brow hiked until it was practically sitting his hair. “Does Jack get his pointless rambling from you?”

Despite the fact that he’d just been interrupted with an insult that wasn’t even veiled, Skreeklavic looked touched. “I hope so, otherwise he’s been spending time with some other no-gooders and I’ll feel cheated of my position as his role model.”

“It should be a crime for you to be a role model,” Phoenix said as he tipped the dregs of wine from one of his bottles into his open mouth.

“Taught you how to be less uncivilized, didn’t I?”

The savage burped, repulsively loudly. “Barely.”

Grimacing, Pitch interrupted the scolding Skreeklavic was about to deliver and said, “Yves has the alchemist petrified and ready for you.”

The werewolf brightened at the news. “Oh, goody.”

Phoenix made a face. “It sounds like you two are up to something disgusting.”

“Have you ever laid eyes on the alchemist, brat?” Skreeklavic sneered, prying himself and his metal leg from his seat. The fire spirit made some sort of negative motion with his head, now planted on the table, and scowled at Skreeklavic’s retreating figure. “It shows,” the werewolf laughed as he clomped off down the stairs.

It took the fire spirit’s inebriated brain all of three seconds to piece together the fact that he had just been left alone with Pitch, and another to leap to his feet and try to gather himself together in order to escape.

But Pitch wanted something from the spirit first, and as soon as Phoenix realised he was being stared at with a shocking amount of intent, he instantly went on guard.

“What do ya want?” Phoenix spat at him, and Pitch’s eyes rolled back into his head. Why were there so many frustrating people in his life? “I meant what I said this morning, bastard. Hurt Frost again and I’ll incinerate you.”

Pitch let his eyes drop until they settled on the fire spirit. The wine was clearly doing wonders for the punk’s confidence – usually he’d be flinching with this much eye contact.

As if on cue, Phoenix twitched a little, and his eyes travelled off to the right, over Pitch’s shoulder. _Ah, there it is,_ Pitch thought with a small, contained laugh.

“Yves told me your story from this morning,” he stated.

Crimson and auburn eyes narrowed. “If you –”

Pitch took a step toward the fire spirit, a deliberate step, and it felt so wonderfully satisfying to have the fire spirit stumbling back in surprise and apprehension. In a low tone, Pitch growled, “Threatening me makes me even less inclined not to do something appalling to you so let me _finish_.” Phoenix grumbled something under his breath, eyes still over Pitch’s shoulder, and the Nightmare King sighed. “I won’t tell Jack. But why doesn’t he have those memories.”

Phoenix flinched. His eyes met Pitch’s once, then danced away. “You think I fucking know?”

Pitch crossed his arms over his chest as he watched the fire spirit’s twitching expression. “Do we have to _fix_ this before something bad happens.”

It took Phoenix a moment, a moment of glaring and turning over his wine-hazed brain to realise what Pitch meant. “You mean if Frost goes loopy like Tanton reckons will happen to the wolves eventually?” The fire spirit shook his head, then abruptly had to reach out for the seat to steady himself. “He never went savage in the first place, so it’s not the same. Ugh, shit. I hate wine.”

Pitch frowned. The frenzy had never affected Jack? He supposed that made sense, considering Yves said that the spirits had been trying to rescue faeries. But still, if by some freak chance Jack was in the same danger as the wolves…. “The tea –”

Another round of eye contact. “Go into his head and I will burn you, Pitch,” the fire spirit warned. Then he smiled, all bite, and added, “And I mean that in the most non-threatening way possible.”

Barely restraining a groan, Pitch rubbed his eyes with his finger and thumb and wondered how on this wretched planet anyone actually dealt with this spirit’s abrasive personality.

Then he remembered the first time he’d encountered the spirit, on the night of Halloween, and Jack glassing the guy just to get him to shut up.

And hadn’t those two known each other for a hundred and fifty years _at least_? Pitch wanted to kill Phoenix and it hadn’t even been a week.

“Then could it be missing for psychological reasons,” Pitch muttered, airing the idea out like a dusty piece of linen.

But, with the rudeness of a freak windstorm, it was torn from his clothesline and thrown into a nearby bush. “Ha!” the spirit scoffed. “Like trauma? Frost ain’t that soft. He’d have half his fucking brain missing if he was.” Righting himself on his feet, the fire spirit snatched a second bottle of wine from the table and shoved past Pitch for the second time that day. “This conversation’s been a pain, imma get some more alcohol that isn’t wine – _ugh_ –”

Feeling the onset of some ruthless irritant-driven headache, Pitch sank down on the edge of the seat as Phoenix stumbled off.

_“Go into his head and I will burn you, Pitch.”_

Stupid fire spirit. He’d _already_ been into Jack’s head. _Twice_.

But what had he seen when he’d been in there?

That morning, after the visit from the Imperials, one particular fear had been prominent in Jack’s chest – the bleeding, burning shard of glass. He couldn’t be sure, not unless he broached the topic of the Holomire directly to see if the exact fear returned, but if that was the manifestation of Jack’s fear of what he couldn’t remember…

It had been the same fear Pitch had tried to break into in the Emporium with no avail, the same fear the creepy spirit had conjured on Halloween, and one which Pitch had fed off the morning after. In the last two cases, Pitch hadn’t been interested in investigating the memories attached to the fear, but in the first – he remembered digging and digging and so much _tension_. He’d barely been able to find an image worthy of frightening Jack with before the spirit’s fear had changed direction and he’d been too stunned to continue.

But even if he hadn’t been taken by surprise – the memory had barely even existed. It hadn’t been guarded, like Pitch had encountered in the minds of the wolves. It had just been…static. Dark, thick static and if Pitch was right and that was what was left of Jack’s memory of the Holomire forest –

Then what had happened to it?

With a start, Pitch felt a lave of familiar fear burn across his tongue, cutting it, freezing it. He looked over the balcony, and his expression darkened when he saw the barman snatch Jack’s hand from his throat and dig talons into the spirit’s flesh. The bleeding, churning, icy fear was turning in Jack’s chest, the glass dripping and snow building beneath it, and Pitch chewed on his tongue to get rid of the awful sensation.

Although curious, Pitch wasn’t actually prepared to go on down to the bar and eavesdrop on their conversation to see if his hypothesis was right. Letting his head recline back on the seat, he watched the frost spirit struggle with the faerie, content to let Jack fight his own battles until he saw the blood dripping onto the bar between the two males.

Jack’s eyes were wide, painfully so, and as the barman snarled at him, Pitch and his failing self-control summoned shadows from beneath the bar and wrapped them around the barman’s wrist. He yanked, violently enough to pry the faerie off Jack, and after a moment of surprise, the barman glanced up and struck Pitch with a daggered look.

There was a clatter, furniture toppling, and Pitch tore his glare away from the barman as Jack, with a hand over his mouth, bolted for the back of the tavern.

_What is…?_ But Pitch’s thoughts dried up when he saw Jack’s staff lying on the ground beneath the barstools he’d knocked over. Pitch stared at it for a second, wondering if he was seeing things or if the stick Jack downright _panicked_ when he was separated from had just been forgotten.

_Something is wrong with him_ , Pitch realised, and before he could stop himself, before he could convince himself to just _ignore_ the problems that weren’t his own, he materialised down at the bar and pressed a crushing boot into the face of a faerie crawling for the staff.

“That’s not yours,” he warned, locking eyes with the faerie until the pathetic thing was quaking and spinning and running for its worthless life. Stretching out a hand, Pitch wrapped Jack’s staff up in his shadows, delivering it into the palm of his hand, and he curled his fingers around the dull, splintering wood.

“Are you the one who left those marks on his neck?”

Stilling, Pitch turned and looked down at the feathered barman. There was a sneer written all over the faerie’s face, in his dark eyes and on the mouth curling into a violent smirk, and Pitch would have been fooled by the bravado if not for the fact that the insides of the faerie were being smothered by fear, thick as smog. It wasn’t fear of Pitch, though – not all of it, anyway. The faerie was terrified for Jack, manifested in the crystals of ice growing out of a pile of feathers in the faerie’s chest.

“Should I take that as a yes?” the barman prodded, leaning forward on the bar and glaring right into Pitch. “To think he’d end up with some goon like you as his new plaything. You don’t look like his type.”

Pitch blinked, and abruptly realised that he was being…what, _provoked_? He laughed – how could he _not_ when such a tiny faerie was spouting such nonsensical shit at him – and turned his back on the barman, prepared to ignore his existence entirely.

Until the damn thing opened his mouth again.

“I didn’t think the Nightmare King would be so submissive.”

Fingers clenched, and before he could think better of rising to such obvious bait, furious golden eyes had spun straight back to the barman. The faerie snickered. “You look mad. Did I make you mad?”

After a quick, angry evaluation, Pitch realised that the faerie, with his tell-tale feathers and those talons from earlier (which were now conveniently retracted) was a Nod – one of the more annoying faerie tribes, in Pitch’s opinion.

_And an aristocrat at that_ , Pitch added as he eyed the beads in the faerie’s hair.

Eyes narrowing, and with a fair amount of coaxing, a delicious flurry of fear exploded in the faerie’s chest. The Nod’s eyes went wide, for all of a moment, before he laughed and, doubling over, clutched at his racing heart. “Haha oh yeah, you’re mad, haha fuck.”

In a scathing tone, Pitch ground out, “Why would being on the receiving end of the frost spirit’s attention, as _you_ so obviously wish you were, make me in any way submissive?”

The Nod bared his teeth at Pitch’s accusation. “You guys haven’t fucked yet, obviously.”

And what was _that_ supposed to mean?

Deciding that he didn’t care – that there were more important things to deal with other than this Nod running his mouth – Pitch stepped up to the bar so he could loom over the short faerie.

“You come from the Oak of Sorrows,” he said blandly.

The barman’s smirk fell and he snarled, “What of it.”

Pitch just shrugged. “It’s a nice place.”

It took barely a moment for the barman’s eyes to widen in outrage at the implication of Pitch’s oh so subtle threat (an empty threat – he had tried destroying the Oak of Sorrows once before, and he wasn’t stupid enough to try _that_ exercise again – but his bluff was a splendid one). Prying his knife out of the bar top, the Nod pointed it dangerously at Pitch. “Prick, what are you –”

But Pitch was faster, angrier, and not deterred in the least by some shiny metal. More shadows, this batch managing to summon a twinge of pain in his chest, drew from beneath the bar and crushed around the faerie’s wrist. With a curse the knife dropped, clattering, and Pitch ducked his head and growled, “You are a tiny fucking faerie with too much nerve. And you’re leaning in blood.”

The barman looked down and his eyes widened in horror when he realised the mess he had his elbows in. More Jack-related fear bloomed in his chest without Pitch’s intervention, and the Nightmare King barely spared the faerie a glance as he stormed off toward the tavern’s bathrooms – toward a bundle of familiar, convulsing fear.

With a firm grip on Jack’s staff and a careful roll of his shoulders, he channelled whatever combat ability he might still own and carved himself a path amongst all the brawling savages. If he was dealing with any other sort of crowd, he would have simply scared his way through the fighting. But aside from the fact that his chest was _already_ aching again, the brutes trying to gouge each other’s eyes out with glass bottles were too preoccupied to worry about turning their attention onto him – and he really didn’t want their attention, anyway.

Bleakly realising that Jack’s method of kicking the earlier raiders off their chosen table was probably a rather fantastic way of doing business in a place like this (physical displays of intimidation and strength, and all that), Pitch toed an unconscious body out of the way of the bathroom door and barged his way through it.

The second he caught sight of Jack, he froze.

The spirit was squatting in front of one of the sinks, hands clenching on the porcelain above him in a white-knuckled grip as blood – how had this spirit gotten so injured in a _single day_ – dripped from his hand and onto the floor.

Pitch’s eyes flickered, briefly, around the bathroom and he exhaled a breath when he confirmed that not a single soul was present; the bursts of ice across the walls and floor offered him his reason why. His attention returned to Jack and his feet carried him over the damp tiled floor and to where the spirit was shaking as he kept muttering to himself, utterly unaware that he was no longer alone.

“Did it work – please tell me it worked – no, wait don’t tell me, I don’t want you to talk to me – why aren’t you saying anything – you always having something to say so just fucking say it – why aren’t you –”

Pitch glanced at the mirror above the basin and his forehead pinched when he saw what had become of it. The glass was shattered, and frost had crept under the panels like roots beneath shallow soil. The shards that had fallen into the sink were splattered in blood.

His eyes fell back onto the frost spirit and he knelt beside Jack, beside the spirit he still considered one of the greatest irritants of his existence, but one which was doing a horrifyingly excellent job of crawling under Pitch’s skin.

Jack’s eyes were squeezed shut as his mouth kept moving, his words eventually mumbling out into incoherent sound. With a start Pitch noticed that his hand wasn’t the only thing that was bleeding. Bright blood was trickling down the side of Jack’s face, trying to crawl into his eye before it dripped onto the ground between his knees.

_Fuck_.

“Jack.” The spirit’s head immediately snapped up, wide and glassy eyes flying to Pitch and there was so much _blood_ in his _hair_ , on his _face_ , that Pitch’s hands were moving before he gave them permission to. Setting the staff against the wall, he grabbed Jack’s face as the spirit tipped back to fall on his ass, and pulled his fingers through the blood-stained hair at his temple to find whatever was bleeding.

“Pitch, _ngh_ ,” Jack murmured, his voice groggy but still managing to shake. It took until Pitch’s thumb found the cut in his hairline for the spirit to gain some coherency. “What are you doing? Wait, stop it’s dirty –”

The Nightmare King narrowed his eyes at the mess that had been made of Jack’s head. The gash was long, bashed, and cut down the side of one of his temples. It was bleeding like all hell, but then again most head wounds did, and it didn’t seem to be deep. Judging by the lack of serious pain on Jack’s face, it wasn’t altogether agonizing either.

To the spirit trembling in his hold, the king gritted out, “Why do you think I’m doing this.”

Jack blinked at him, all blood and trembling limbs and looking as frightened as Pitch had ever seen him, and fuck if it didn’t make something inside the king break, if only a little. “I’m sorry,” the spirit started mumbling, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean what I said before –”

But this wasn’t the time to talk. Pitch’s inner pragmatic field guide was telling him to clean, to wash, to _fix_ , before this quivering spirit contracted some sort of fae-borne blood disease and his all skin fell off.

So when he rocked back on his heels and asked, “Can you stand?” he hadn’t meant to cut off Jack’s attempt at scrambling back into Pitch’s good graces, and he hadn’t meant to make the spirit flinch like he’d physically hit him. With a pained sigh, he amended his words. “Apologise to me after we stop the bleeding. Unless you want to ruin the new clothes you’ve just stolen.”

That seemed to ease Jack a little, but since nothing was ever easy with him, the spirit mumbled, “I don’t care about my clothes.”

The Nightmare King ignored the refutation. “Are you dizzy?”

After a moment of just staring at Pitch, Jack nodded, almost imperceptibly. Wrapping his hands around Jack’s cold wrists, one slick with blood, Pitch stood and dragged the spirit up high enough for him to wrap an arm around Jack’s bony ribcage. He guided them over to a – marginally – cleaner sink and ran the cold water.

“This is probably going to hurt,” Pitch warned the spirit, who was currently inspecting a red clump of his hair.

Jack just tipped a look up to the Nightmare King, a _dry_ look of all things, before reaching for the sink and dipping his head under the running water.

With just a hint of morbid curiosity, Pitch watched as Jack rubbed at his hair, washing the blood from the strands before scrubbing over his face and rinsing out his mouth without once hesitating from pain. When the spirit began to lose his balance, Pitch folded up the sleeves of his coat and kept a hand on Jack’s spine, splayed as an anchor to keep him stable. The spirit’s shoulders hunched, and he pulled his head out of the running water so he could shove his hand under the faucet.

“It won’t stop bleeding,” he muttered, and Pitch pulled Jack back by his hoodie so he could have a look at the problem himself.

He grimaced when he saw the puncture wounds across Jack’s palm, and said, “The talons of a Nod are poisonous, he could have at least –”

“He was mad,” Jack whispered, blindly staring at the water as it collected up swirls of blood and cascaded over the side of his hand. “I don’t even think he noticed.”

“He should have,” Pitch grumbled, taking Jack’s curling palm and opening it up to the water in some hope of cleaning out some of the poison.

The spirit’s head swayed, then fell against Pitch’s shoulder. A quick glance informed Pitch that the wound at Jack’s temple was no longer bleeding – he had probably iced it up to stop it from making a mess – and so he focused on the cold limb in his hand.

“I’m sensing déjà vu here,” Jack joked quietly, and Pitch had to physically restrain himself from slapping the spirit in the face with his own bloodied hand. He pulled a small bundle of white from his pocket, and, cheek pressed against his coat, Jack laughed a little at the sight of the bandages. “You’re still carrying those around?”

He was, because the last time he’d been in the Emporium he’d been more focused on arguing with the smith or the Imperials than cleaning out his pockets. But instead of saying so, he pointed out a fact that Yves had seemed so unconcerned about: “It has been less than a week.”

The spirit was silent, and Pitch _felt_ that silence as if it had physically manifested itself and shoved a hand into his chest. He felt it because he was silent for the exact same reason, because these last few days had felt a lot longer than they should have.

But more than that. The days themselves had been revelations. He’d gone from seeing this spirit as a naïve Guardian to realizing that three centuries had left their mark on the male, had carved something deep into him that Pitch caught a glimpse of every time ice filled his eyes.

And it made Pitch crave to just pull Jack apart, to _reduce_ the spirit to _pieces_ , and find out _more_.

“Say something,” Jack murmured as Pitch rearranged his cold fingers and began to meticulously wrap his hand. The bleeding wouldn’t stop, not until Pitch grabbed that Nod by his aristocratic beads and forced him to fix Jack’s hand, but at least this way Jack wouldn’t be throwing around his bodily fluids every time he flicked his wrist.

The king’s gaze dropped to Jack’s face. Water was falling off the tips of his white hair too fast to crystalize, beading down pale cheeks too swiftly to freeze, and with his eyes half-closed and his weight growing heavier against Pitch’s side by the minute, the spirit looked at his most vulnerable. Not emotionally vulnerable, not like he had when he’d kissed Pitch last night, but vulnerable enough that Pitch knew if he dropped the spirit’s hand and stepped back Jack would crash to the floor and probably not get back up again.

_His faith in me…. it…_

His jaw tightened.

“Who did this?” Pitch asked, wet fingers tipping Jack’s sopping fringe back from his eyes.

Jack looked up at him, eyes a little unfocused, before nuzzling his cheek back into the shoulder of Pitch’s coat.

With a sinking sense of dread, it didn’t take long for Pitch to realise the answer for himself, and suddenly the fire spirit’s question from Skreeklavic’s fortress, the rushed, “ _Is he walking or about to throw himself from the battlements?_ ” slapped him right across the face.

And as that dread sank, deeper and deeper, Pitch woke up to the fact that the life which had been carved into this frost spirit, this spirit that was silently curling into Pitch’s side as the Nightmare King wrapped his poisoned hand, a life that Pitch had barely brushed the surface of, had left its toll.

Golden eyes flickered toward the ruined mirror. _And this is how he’s trying to deal with it._

In a low voice, a calm voice – because Pitch _knew_ he had to approach this carefully – he asked, “There is something talking to you, isn’t there?”

Jack’s eyes opened fully, his eyebrows pinching in confusion. “What do you –?” Pitch watched, with an acute sense of apprehension, as cold and awakening realisation struck the spirit, and Jack went very still against the king. “Oh.”

There was silence, the kind of silence that made Pitch think that Jack was going to try and shuck off the question again. But then the spirit inhaled a deep breath and mumbled, “No. There’s nothing.”

Pitch exhaled a bitter laugh as he finished wrapping up Jack’s hand. He tucked a fraying piece of bandage under the others and said, “Do not ignore me again.”

“Pitch –”

He spun Jack – which probably wasn’t the best idea, considering the spirit could barely stand on his own, but Pitch had him by the shoulders so he wouldn’t fall – and pressed his back into the sink so he could inflict Jack with the full weight of his stare. “Shut up and listen to me,” Pitch snapped, and Jack stared up at him with shards of terror in his eyes. “I have signed up for ample amounts of crazy just by being associated with you, and none of us – not your werewolves, or your Halloween King, or your menacing fire spirit need to deal with a dose from you as well.”

Jack’s eyes cracked wide, and Pitch saw a spark of anger in amongst the cold. “I’m not crazy,” he spat.

“No, you’re not,” Pitch agreed. “Because you are going to fix whatever is happening in here –” he tapped the top of Jack’s head with a knuckle, and the spirit ducked in annoyance “– before it becomes something unmanageable.”

_Before it makes you do something like this again._

Jack swallowed. “I’m not… I’m not a liability. I – I can leave. I’ll leave. Then they –”

But that wasn’t what Pitch was getting at, and the second the king himself realised as much, he felt like tearing out his hair. Hadn’t he _just_ been internally ranting about how he didn’t want to deal with another psychotic partnership? How he was meant to be looking out for _himself_ here?

But right now, his own wellbeing had been thrown over the shoulder of some obscene emotion and carried off out of his sight. _It had been carried off a while ago_ , he thought grimly as his hands left wet patches on Jack’s sleeves.

He’d just been using his anger to try and deny it.

And now it was too late, because Pitch couldn’t find any strength left in his arms to pull away from Jack and let the spirit rot in his own problems. Not when the spirit in front of him looked….looked so _small_. Not when Pitch had been forced to endure everything Jack had been throwing at him since they’d met again, not when there was something so clearly _wrong_ with this brat and Pitch was the one who was _here_.

Not when he had _seen_ people – brilliant, crazy, unique minds – get eaten from the inside out by demons like the ones Jack was so obviously denying, and even at his most evil, even when _he_ was the one contemplating hollowing out the minds of his enemies with fear, there were few people he wished that sort of pain on.

And Jack was not one of them.

So, without letting Jack finish the crap he was saying, Pitch said, “If I am stuck with these weirdoes then you are too. If you leave, I leave, and Skreeklavic doesn’t get his help. There’s your incentive not to be an idiot and run when you clearly need help.”

Jack’s expression twitched. “I’m not an idiot.”

Pitch rolled his eyes at how Jack had _completely missed his point_ , but then the spirit was slumping against the sink, his eyes roving the floor, and his lips parted.

“Don’t you think I would have fixed this if I could?” he whispered. Pitch stared down at him in mild surprise. When Jack looked up he found some strength in his voice again and stated, “I don’t want to fight you. I never want to fight you – except for the times that I do – but today wasn’t one of those! You were being so _nice_ today! Even after this morning. And I... They make me. They make me feel the wrong emotions and they try to make me think things I don’t actually believe and they want me to hate you. I keep telling them they’re wrong, but…”

_They keep fighting you back._

Collecting the spirit by the sides of his neck, Pitch murmured, “Then why don’t you just give in and hate me?” It would be easier, safer, it would dissolve whatever decrepit link Jack was trying to forge between them and keep everything as it should be. It would keep Jack’s mind from fighting him, keep him from doing _this_.

But Jack was already shaking his head, not just weakly but vehemently, and, pulling loose of Pitch’s fingers, he tipped forward and pressed his nose into the lapel of his coat. “I don’t hate you. And I’m not gonna let some twisted fucking words in my head tell me otherwise.”

His reply was muffled by the thick material of the coat, but its impact was not diminished. For a stunned moment, Pitch was left staring at the reflection of the back of the spirit, of wet hair staining his hoodie and a bandaged hand limp at his side.

_Two people saying this to me in one day…_

He didn’t know whether to be flattered or shake some sense into the spirit. Instead of either, though, his mouth opened and his bewildered mind managed to string together a grumbled, “You are so stupid.”

“I’m not stupid,” Jack lashed back, too angry, and Pitch froze when he heard the spirit choke on a sob. “I’m not pathetic. I’m not weak. I’m not insa–”

“I didn’t mean that,” Pitch quietly amended, and he felt Jack’s heaving breaths smooth out a little. He sighed. “Why didn’t you say any of this before? I _asked_ you –”

He cut himself off before he could finish the question, and for an absurd moment, a sense of insecurity prickled along Pitch’s skin. He and Jack were still tiptoeing around each other, they were still stepping on landmines and hurting each other, so why would Jack even _want_ Pitch to find out about such a disastrous weakness? Pitch was still his sort-of-nemesis, right? Wouldn’t he want to offload these problems onto someone he could actually trust?

Like the Guardians.

“They wouldn’t let me,” Jack murmured, and Pitch stiffened a little. Jack pulled back just a fraction, and ran fingers that had finally stopped shaking over the frost he’d left on Pitch’s coat. “Phoenix asked me this morning as well and they made the wrong words come out of my mouth. But they’re gone. I made them go away. They’ll come back, but they’re gone for now.”

_So my being the Nightmare King hadn’t been the problem, then_ , Pitch thought, perhaps a little relieved. But then the rest of Jack’s words registered, and Pitch’s brows drew together. The fire spirit had noticed that something was wrong as well? And he’d had the gall to brush Pitch off when the Nightmare King had showed some concern about Jack’s mental health?!

Pitch was going to kill him. Painfully, maliciously. It was going to be _wonderful_ and gruesome and –

“Don’t tell anyone,” Jack quietly begged. “Please. Not even me. If they know you know they’ll get mad.”

Pitch had more than his fair share of reservations about that request, and he pointedly did not agree to it in favour of asking, “What happens when they’re angry?”

“It hurts. They make me sick.”

“Is that why you came running in here?”

A small nod was all Pitch received in reply, and the Nightmare King’s fingers brushed back into Jack’s hair, just behind his ear. Jack twitched a little before relaxing and leaning his head back into Pitch’s hold. Icy eyes opened, looked up at Pitch, and the Nightmare King traced his gaze over the small weaving suture of ice along Jack’s temple, holding the broken skin together.

“You made them disappear,” he said quietly. When Jack tried to look down and away from him, Pitch took the spirit’s cheek in his free hand and redirected his gaze. “Don’t do it again. Don’t do _this_ again. We’ll find a different way to make them leave.”

Jack looked surprised, wary, but he also looked tired, and the latter seemed to take precedence when the spirit closed his eyes and his nose turned in and brushed Pitch’s palm so softly that the man had to grit his teeth. “We?” Jack murmured, his breath cold against the inside of Pitch’s wrist. “Before it was just me.”

Pitch nearly laughed at how shockingly apt those words were. “I might as well buy into some of your problems while I’m here,” he stated, because if he was going to ruin his life, he might as well do it properly.

Dark eyebrows sank, pained. “You don’t want to buy into my real-estate. The soil’s rotten. It’s so ugly.”

“It’ll be familiar, then.”

Jack’s eyes cracked open, and a small, sad smile crept onto his face. Pitch’s chest tightened, and this time it wasn’t because of his shadows. “I want to go for a walk. Will you come with me?”

As if Pitch even had the _ability_ to say no to this spirit anymore.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> oh. my. god. 
> 
> thank you everyone for your kudos and comments, i love each of them and each of you and thank you for reading this story and being so patient with me while I finished these chapters off. The next chapter will hopefully be like a big hug after the angst train happening in these last chapters, so i'm gonna go and finish that off now....


	19. In the Absence of Thought(s)... (Part I)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Jack and Pitch take a romantic stroll through the not-so-romantic downtown streets and Pitch discovers that he is not quite as tactful, or tactical, as he thought he was.

In hindsight, a walk was probably not the best course of action for someone who was sporting, if his swaying was any indication, what could’ve possibly been quite a serious head injury. But the frost spirit had dragged Pitch from the tavern positively adamant that the two of them acquire some “fresh air” – even though the corrosive, dust-filled smog they were currently cutting their way through was anything _but_ fresh.

The wind cascading through the narrow streets of the downtown districts was clogged with smoke and fear and darkness – the latter pair thick enough to choke and pollute even the most resilient of constitutions. It was the opposite of anything lungs should be inflated with, and in reality it should have been Pitch’s ultimate fantasy of a dank neighbourhood.

But it really, _really_ wasn’t.

Whenever he visited these downtown districts to feed (on sporadic and spontaneous occasions, such as impromptu trips with a bunch of strange villains, or, more realistically, when he could get close enough to a ring of fungi without his Nightmares pouncing on him) there was always an air of resignation to the fear he collected. The people living down on the grim-filled streets lived in terror, but they had always lived in terror – of the Imperials, of the rebels, of starving and the cold and of each other – so he was never able to acquire the kind of purity one found when scaring blissfully innocent little children out of their right minds.

All fear (except his own) was strength, and he accepted that – with resentment and a hint of bitterness, but acceptance nonetheless – but the fear here was…dissatisfying. Like landing blows on an already unconscious opponent.

So as the Nightmare King followed in the icy (and weaving) footsteps of the frost spirit he was so ironically accompanying – because wasn’t it just yesterday that _he’d_ been leading _Jack_ around by the nose in some wretched wilderness – he felt his unstimulated mind begin to wander, to slink through the crevices of his senses and thoughts because its master had no taste for the fear swarming around them. Because its master had nothing to keep it engaged, to keep it from roaming.

For this exact reason, idle walks were not typically Pitch’s idea of a worthwhile use of his time – he needed to occupy himself with something, _anything_ , to keep his muscles from twitching and his brain from turning over and in on itself out of frustration. He’d spent so much of his life constantly engaged in strategic composition, in critiquing and outmanoeuvring his colleagues and his enemies, in plotting and _scheming_ that having no fundamental purpose, like he did at the moment, was excruciating.

_I could return to my plotting_ , he supposed as Jack, several paces ahead of him, threw a hand out to a nearby lamppost to steady himself and accidently send a waft of cold right up the metal, covering the whole thing in shards of deadly sharp ice. Gingerly cracking his hand out of the ice, Pitch heard the spirit apologise to the lamp before hurrying on.

Pitch eyed the newly outfitted lamp and remembered, blearily, ice just like this pouring through his Nightmares so long ago. _I could start mapping out my next big clash with the Guardians_ , he mused. After all it had taken him nearly two hundred years to perfect his Nightmares and rally his forces for the last skirmish.

Light, still somehow spluttering out of the lamp, was caught within the shards of ice, refraction illuminating the spearheads all around the metal fixture. Pitch’s footsteps ceased, and his mind turned over, just once.

How, though, was he meant to start plotting out something marvellous when his chest ached whenever he used his shadows? He didn’t even know if the incessant pain was going to be a permanent addition to his hellish existence, something he would have to factor into his future plans, or if it would fade when he finally wrangled his Nightmares back under his control.

If _I ever wrangle my Nightmares back under my control_ , he bitterly amended.

“Pitch?”

Gold and silver eyes strafed to the frost spirit, who had paused with one hand hovering close to the face of the next house down. He was watching Pitch, curious and open and _tired_ – so far from the ball of energy Pitch had had to contend with before tonight – and Pitch felt his restless focus converge upon the blond in front of him.

_“If they’re all dead before they get a chance to come back to their senses –”_

_You saved one of my Nightmares_ , he thought, remembering pale fingers sinking into dark sand and Jack’s so pure fear. _You saved her from me. From your disobedient ice_.

Yesterday, he’d demanded a reason why – something Jack had so nicely avoided providing an answer for, Pitch vaguely recalled. Yves had said that the spirit buried things that he couldn’t deal with –

_And apparently he’s also perfectly capable of talking his way around problems he doesn’t_ want _to deal with_.

Well, if the spirit wanted to draw his little red line around all the matters which were actually _conducive_ to Pitch’s peace of mind, that was just too bad. Because Pitch might have lost his mind by agreeing to stay with Jack – by _volunteering_ to _help_ the spirit, however he was meant to do _that_ – but that didn’t mean he was content with remaining clueless about all this rubbish orbiting around Jack and his fire spirit.

“Where are you leading us?” he asked.

After a silent pause, Jack shrugged, and his eyes returned to the house in front of him. “Nowhere in particular.” A small, pale hand brushed against the decaying exterior of the townhouse, and at once ice burst from the frost spirit’s touch. The crystalized water grew up the side of the house, before bowing back over Jack’s head and creating a giant archway that loomed over the entire street. “Just, you know, away from people. The usual.”

_Can’t he be content with being “away from people”_ after _we get this job done?_ Pitch frowned when he noticed that the spirit was still swaying, if only a little. _Better yet, couldn’t he seek tranquillity when he wasn’t on the verge of fainting?_

“If there’s no point to this –”

“You know,” Jack interrupted, earning an annoyed eye-twitch from Pitch. “I used to hate not being able to be seen. It was… well, I don’t need to tell you, right? You know the feeling too,” the frost spirit added this last part languidly, icy eyes flickering to the Nightmare King as a bite of all things twisted through his words.

For an uncontrollable, unreasonable moment, a disbelieving smile danced around the corner of Pitch’s mouth at the sight of that damn attitude. It shouldn’t have, it _really_ shouldn’t have – Pitch’s pride should have been snivelling, his dignity screaming – but considering this was the first exchange the two had had in nearly half an hour, and by some miracle it wasn’t another attempt at slaughtering his meticulously polished feelings, Pitch had nothing but vaguely surprised amusement to offer the spirit.

In fact, a part of him was even thankful that Jack had regained enough sense to be snarky. It enabled Pitch to mend and restabilise his sentiments again – the ones which had been scratched at, been _rattled_ , so mercilessly whilst the spirit had been rubbing, half-dazed and so _affectionately_ , against his chest back in the tavern.

Eyes that were a hell of a lot sharper than they’d been an hour ago flickered to Pitch’s mouth, to the pinch Pitch was apparently failing at hiding his amusement with, and with the oddest expression on his face the spirit turned back to his ice. Then, in a softer voice, said, “Nowadays it’s like, sometimes I just can’t stand being noticed, feeling so many eyes that can _see_. Isn’t that stupid?”

_Not really_ , Pitch thought, his gaze sweeping off toward the hollow buildings around them. “So run to your little children,” he replied, the implied, _Because they’ll never see you_ , loud and clear and obvious enough that the spirit rolled his eyes coldly.

“I do,” he replied, a brittle edge to his voice. “But for now, a walk in the dark with the Boogeyman is the best I’ve got.”

Eyes narrowing at the jab, Pitch wandered over to the spirit and his over-the-top creation. His back against the house, Jack had decided to ignore Pitch in favour of dedicating himself to growing icicles from the highest point of the arch, a curve that sat at least two stories in the air. He didn’t even spare Pitch a glance as the Nightmare King silently approached the spirit’s shoulder, and Pitch looked between the small, cold male and the threatening spikes that were growing down toward his bandaged hand, extended like it held some irresistible fodder that was intoxicating to ice crystals.

_This is utterly unnecessary_ , Pitch thought as the growing icicle sharpened, its pure and translucent form cracking internally under its huge weight.

Jack, though, apparently thought that leaving a path of icy destruction in their wake was a _complete_ necessity. Ever since he’d caught sight of the staff leaning against the bathroom wall in the tavern – to his great surprise, distress, and relief, in that order – he’d been more than careless with his use of it. Although Pitch could probably find it in himself to enjoy the sight of such blatant destruction of property, if there happened to be Imperials lurking around the place then their pursuit of fresh air could become dicey very quickly.

Pitch was still enthusiastic about his bitter plan to bring the Fae Empire to its knees – but he was decidedly _not_ prepared for it just yet.

“You’re making a mess,” he muttered, eyeing another large crack splintering the inside of the huge ice structure.

“Not gonna help me this time?”

Pitch exhaled a small laugh at the murmured reply. _Maybe I spoke too soon about being thankful for this little shit’s backtalk._ The Nightmare King’s eyes skimmed down over the concentrating frost spirit, his gaze unconsciously focusing on the bruises on the pale neck. _I just want to bite into his throat until he can’t speak at all._

With a not-so-gentle urging of his fingers in crisply white hair, Pitch turned the spirit’s head toward him. Jack glanced up at him briefly, questioningly, but didn’t try to duck out of Pitch’s hold as the Nightmare King traced his eyes over the well-sealed wound in the spirit’s hairline. “I do not care to waste my shadows on something so trivial,” he retorted, content to see that the cut wasn’t showing any signs of becoming something medically ominous.

He let the spirit go, prepared for a gasp of some sort of appalled exclamation, or a vehement defence of whatever he was building. But when Pitch received neither, he peered curiously down at the spirit’s face and saw, with a trickling sense of pleasure, a dusting of blush across the Jack’s cheeks and nose.

A tongue darted out, nervously, to the cut on his lip and a hungry part of Pitch wanted to meet it with his own.

However, thirty minutes spent stalking through the districts’ decaying streets had calmed some of Pitch’s lacking self-control, and he managed – if barely – to refrain from doing anything as questionable as delving back into that cold mouth and inducing those gut-clenching whimpers from last night.

_Even though he probably wouldn’t object if I tried_. He brushed the side of Jack’s mouth with his thumb, startling the small pink tongue back into the spirit’s mouth.

“If you keep touching it, it won’t heal,” he warned as cool breath ghosted, in broken little waves, over the side of his thumb. The chill sent a prickle across Pitch’s skin, up the inside of his wrist, and he had to physically withhold the muscle spasm that would have had his fingers curling over the spirit’s jawline, pressing into flesh and bone. Jack audibly swallowed and then pulled back, his forehead pinching in some relative of a pained frown.

_Maybe he would object_ , Pitch amended, and let his hand fall back to his side.

A commotion erupted up ahead, scuffling and shouting followed by the kind of laughter that burst from the throats of complete _lunatics_. Eyes leaving the spirit to pierce through the darkness, Pitch sighed and deftly stepped from the dirty road onto the frost-splattered footpath to get out of the way of a mob of black-coated rebels sprinting toward them. He grabbed Jack by the hood and yanked him out of the path of the stampeding herd in time to hear the spirit utter, “Why are they smiling?”

The rebels dashed past them, black coats flying and masks cracked and broken. Several were carrying their wounded, while the rest cheered about whatever heroic act of terrorism they’d just accomplished. A few threw cutting grins over in their direction, the kind that could never slice as deeply as those of Yves, but had enough of a threat in them to be serious.

Pitch managed to keep a glare off his face as the lot passed, which was more than he could say about Jack, whose entire expression was twitching with something Pitch really didn’t care to think about. He was about to shove the spirit on, probably with a boot to his ass – because he was _not_ in the mood for Jack to pick a fight with the rebels and invite them all back over only so they could recognise the coat on Pitch’s back and fight him for it – when he heard _another_ set of footfalls approach.

A louder, steadier set. And a whole lot of clanging armour.

Pitch groaned loudly. His fist bunched in Jack’s hoodie as he dragged the spirit off the street and down the nearest alley.

“Jesus _Christ_ Pitch –”

“Imperials,” was the Nightmare King’s muttered reply.

“Oh.”

_Oh?!_

“Are you –?” But when Pitch glared down at the spirit, he saw enough fear in Jack’s chest to nullify the indignant remark he’d had in store. Jack detangled himself from Pitch’s grip and stumbled over to the other side of the alley so he could smack his staff against the wall of the house he’d grown his ice bridge off. There was the sound of cracking, a piercing splinter, and Pitch ducked his head around the corner of the building just in time to see giant icicles crash into the road and effectively dam up the entire street.

_It’ll slow the Imperials down_ , he supposed, maybe a little impressed. But Jack might as well have just hung a sign on the lamppost declaring, “In the name of Jack Frost, halt!” for all the help it was going to be once the faeries broke through the roadblock.

“They’re going to think we are allied with the rebels,” Pitch growled at the frost spirit making a hasty retreat down the alley. The “we” slipped from his lips a little too easily, too carelessly. But before he could think to correct himself, he bleakly realised that at the rate things were going – where the faeries were concerned, at least – his lot had already been thrown in with the frost spirit.

And it wasn’t like Jack even noticed the slip. The spirit threw a hand over his head, waving Pitch on as he continued down the alley. “Better than the rebels thinking we’re in bed with the Imperials.”

Pitch shook his head as he followed after the spirit. “ _How_ is that better?”

Jack cocked an eyebrow when the Nightmare King reached him. They’d stopped outside a barricaded door, covered in wooden boards and nails and three giant padlocks hooked over a bolt. The frost spirit had a hand against the doorframe, holding himself upright as he breathed a little too heavily. “Have you ever been caught in the middle of the skirmishes between the two?”

Pitch frowned. _The longer we walk, the more I consider throwing you over my shoulder and taking you back to the tavern._

He didn’t say as much, though – after all, surely the spirit was old enough to know his physical limits. _Surely_.

_I am going to hit him if he faints on me._

“No,” Pitch eventually replied. He’d picked through the aftermath of one, but so far had done an excellent job of avoiding an actual fight.

Jack grimaced. “Lucky. It’s disgusting, and if I had to place my bets with any one side, it’d be the rebels and their horrifying fighting style. I swear the only reason the Imperials still have control of the realm is sheer numbers alone.”

That was… probably quite an accurate estimation, from what Pitch knew about the turmoil happening here. He usually kept tabs on the dirtiest business taking place in most of the major realms – for the sake of finding a nice stepping stone upon which he could orchestrate the mass destruction of the entire world, of course – and although the political struggle happening in the Fae Empire had long grown tiresome, it was still worth duly noting.

_Although why_ you _of all people would take interest in it is beyond me_ , Pitch thought as the spirit in his view began feeling up the boards of wood barring the door. His shoulder found the brick exterior of the house and he asked, mildly, “You’re concerned over fae politics?”

“Hell no. But Bunny would tell me about all the shit happening in the world whether I liked it or not and this” – he waved his hand around them, gesturing toward the entire realm, Pitch assumed – “kept coming up. He probably thinks reading the paper to me while I’m trying to relax in some snow – which is so rude, I can’t even _begin_ – will like, make me a better person or something.”

_His rambling seems to be in full swing. I suppose that’s a good sign._

Pointedly eyeing the way the spirit was so obviously trying to find a way to break into this house, Pitch lazily said, “I see it had no effect.”

Throwing his hands and his staff up in the air, Jack made a loud noise of exasperation and groaned, “That’s what I’ve been _trying_ to tell him!”

_You wouldn’t have had that problem if you had come with me_. It was a rather unhelpful thought, but still fitting enough to make the Nightmare King hum aloud in annoyed agreement with himself.

“They probably got their war tactics from Boreas.”

Pitch blinked at the spirit’s grumbling. “The Winter King?”

Fussing around with the locks on the door, Jack said, “He has armies in his realm large enough to swallow the entire world. He appreciates quality, like any warmongering bastard, but its quantity that really matters to him. Probably compensating for his tiny-ass dick, the piece of icy – _shit, why is this locked_?!”

Barely able to contain his laughter at the way the frost spirit had spiralled into cursing so _quickly_ , Pitch filed away the information about the Winter King’s military strength and, with a thoughtful pause, realised, “By refusing to give them an audience, the Winter King is probably making the Imperials very nervous.”

“They should be grateful that he’s _shielding_ them from his ugly face and his fucking hideous beard and the stupid damn coats he wears. I swear some of those furs are made of human skin, he’s such a creepy –,” the spirit continued ranting as he drew back his staff as if he was going to try and break though the wood and nails with it.

Pitch was distantly curious about the relationship between Jack and the Winter King – a king who thought it fanciful to send them a god’s fistful of icy spikes, Pitch recalled darkly – but for the moment he forcibly deposited his concern back into the present realm, and the distinct sound of the Imperials fretting over the ice clogging up the street near the mouth of their alley.

A sharp pang shot through Pitch’s chest as a hand of shadows reached out from behind the spirit and grabbed hold of the staff, gripping it tightly as Jack was about to smash it down on the barricade. With a start, Jack looked back at the shadows, then cast an annoyed look over at Pitch. “What the hell?”

“If you keep treating it like that, it will break.”

Jack just stared at him. Pitch half expected a snapped reply, something regarding the fact that _Pitch_ had once broken the thing, but all that came out Jack’s mouth was a grumbled, “It’s lasted this long without complaints.”

Pitch’s shadows let go of the staff, the man himself releasing a breath as the pain in his chest eased a little. He shooed Jack away from the threshold and said, “It’s covered in splinters and probably infested with termites.”

The spirit gasped. “Ew! I do not have _termites_ in my staff.”

“Woodworms, then,” he amended as he felt over the wooden barricade for himself, managing to pry a few pieces off around hip-height. “You do not take very good care of it.”

With an indignant huff, the spirit glared at Pitch – with enough venom that the Nightmare King could _feel_ the look, much to his amusement – as he groused, “It’s been with me for three hundred years. We’re tough.”

_Tough or not, the both of you need to be taken better care of_ , Pitch thought to himself as he snapped off another weakly-nailed slab.

With some well-placed (and painful) shadows and a kick that earned an exaggerated applause from the silly spirit he was with, Pitch busted through the old locks and the door. He’d removed enough of the wood for himself and Jack to contort themselves through, and with the sounds of shouts carrying down their alleyway from the street, Pitch shoved Jack on through the gap before following the spirit.

The interior of the house was in terrible shape, as could be expected from a home long abandoned out of fear or force, and squatters were huddled in a kitchen area around a small fire. Pitch bodily forced the door closed behind him, and Jack – with all the strength of a newborn foal – wheezed and groaned as he pushed a stained lounge chair over to the door Pitch was holding up.

_Is he so weak because he still feels faint, or because he’s questionably out of shape?_

As a couple of the squatters peered curiously over at the strange boy struggling to move such a reasonably sized chair, Pitch watched, in enjoyment and impatience, as the spirit and his treasure grew closer. When Jack glanced up at the Nightmare King, a scowl pulled his eyebrows together.

“What are you laughing at?” he accused.

“Not laughing,” Pitch denied, although the squatters had started snickering.

“Yeah, yeah.”

The spirit wiggled the chair into place against the door, and with an almighty sigh, straightened up so he could stretch out his back. The chair obviously wouldn’t stop a vanguard of Imperials from storming the house, but since Pitch couldn’t hear any footsteps or sense any danger lurking outside the door, he figured the Imperials were more concerned about the band of hightailing rebels than two figures crawling into an old house.

“This way,” Jack called from an old staircase, and with a brief glance at the now-uninterested squatters, Pitch followed after him.

The two climbed to the highest point within the townhouse, a room accessible only by a metal ladder and which opened to the night sky above them – in every literal way possible. The entire ceiling of the room used to be some sort of skylight, but age and wear and probably a few instruments of warfare had shattered the huge dome of glass, littering the entire room with huge and minuscule shards of glass and allowing the smoky air from outside to waft on into the house.

As Jack slicked up a strip of the room, laying ice so thick it allowed him to walk right over the glass without cutting his feet, Pitch crunched glass under his boots as he spied an old half-broken piano in the corner of the room. Many of the keys were missing, and there seemed to be blood splattered on the ones still attached. Pitch made a point of ignoring the bodily fluids as he stepped onto the piano’s stool, then onto the back of the instrument so he could reach up for the frame of the skylight. Pulling some pieces of glass out of the way and throwing them over his shoulder (where the frost spirit was adamantly _not_ , he noted first) Pitch leapt up to the metal frame and hauled himself up onto the roof.

The burn in his muscles was as satisfying as it was old – a hot, tearing pain that had been so familiar once, and which had begun to show itself lately with his overworking of the smith’s scythes. Having his shadows at his disposal for so long had made him physically reliant on them for so many things – transportation, fighting, _intimidation_. Gone were the days when people would take one look at him – at _him_ , at all of his training and his hard work – and grow still in admiration and inklings of fear.

_I miss this_ , he thought as he rolled out his shoulders, feeling an ache stretch between them.

Hearing a little _oof_ from behind him, Pitch glanced over his shoulder, and then down at the spirit hanging with his elbows on the frame of the skylight. Pitch raised a brow at him. “Shouldn’t you be more proficient at this?”

Jack groaned and, tossing his staff onto the roof, tried to haul himself up with his upper body strength. But the spirit apparently had none at all, and as he nearly fell back down into the hole, muttered, “The wards in this place cut me off from Boreas’s winds.”

Pitch’s brow rose higher. Why did the wards matter when the spirit could probably create a staircase of ice from here all the way to the Imperial castle?

_Or is he just copying me, like a small dog?_

The thought made the eyebrow twitch back into its standard position. “And without that you’re just left with snowballs.”

Jack pouted and slapped his unbandage hand on the roof tiles. “Are you gonna help me or just stand there like some asshole?”

The Nightmare King stared at him, and after another failure of an attempt at hoisting himself over the frame, Jack eventually added, “ _Please_ , oh almighty –”

With a sigh that said, “ _Finally,_ ” in a way mere words couldn’t, Pitch held out his hand and Jack immediately abandoned his whining to reach up and grab the limb. The Nightmare King dragged the spirit up a little too easily – maybe Skreeklavic was onto something when he kept mentioning how scrawny the spirit was – and as soon as Jack’s feet were on solid ground, he abandoned Pitch to gather up his staff again.

Staff safely in his possession once again, the spirit deftly navigated his way to the edge of the building. Watching him go, Pitch absently flexed his hand, feeling the tendons shift and the imprint of cold disperse.

_I’ve touched him so much these past few days, I should be used to this by now._

When Jack reached the edge of the roof, overlooking the little alley they’d just escaped through, he tapped his staff against the gutter and a fanning of thick ice reached out from their building to the next, forming a bridge with elaborate little decorations on its underside. The spirit skipped across it, testing it once for integrity before sliding off it and onto the next roof.

“Will you let me apologise now?”

Pitch startled a little at the question, posed by the spirit on the next roof over, and let his hand fall as he crossed the slick but thankfully short icy bridge. “There is no need.”

Jack pinned him with a look as Pitch approached him – a look that resembled the pinched expression from earlier. “Pretty sure there’s a need.”

“I am not angry,” he replied, brushing past Jack. He had been after their argument – furious at having his oh so rare effort of not being such a selfish bastard thrown in his face, pissed off at realising that this spirit was potentially as toxic as the villains he’d had to get a little too comfortable with in his past.

But that was before Pitch knew how insidious this thing messing with Jack was – and how, by some miracle, the spirit wasn’t averse to being helped. Usually, in Pitch’s experience of things, that wasn’t the case – he either had to live with his companions’ psychotic traits or leave, and most of the time leaving the alliance would have seen him dead within the week.

But this time was different.

And he’d told Jack that he could be the one to help him.

Which, in hindsight, was probably one of the stupidest things to ever leave his mouth.

_I received no benefit, I guaranteed no payment, and_ damnit _I’m not even_ equipped _to fix minds._ Frustration pinched at Pitch, biting his flesh with tiny serrated jaws, and the Nightmare King wished he could dunk his head in some icy water and just stop making all these pathetic, conceding decisions. The only sure thing that came out of being thoughtful or caring or weak was a heart-stopping cocktail of betrayal, pain, and death, and now –

_And now I’ve promised him something I probably won’t be able to follow through with._

Pitch considered the spirit who was now sulking as they crossed the flat metal roof. He didn’t know how much faith Jack had invested in his words – probably wouldn’t, until the next obstacle arose and rudely tripped up Pitch’s usually unfaltering bitterness – but Jack had always seemed, at any rate, to be persistent about keeping Pitch on his side, promise of assistance or no.

_He’s always done that – he’s been apologising since Halloween, though the darkness knows why considering the things I’ve done to him_.

Pitch licked his lips, tasted the dry smoke lurking around their rooftop like a clinging plague, and added, “You worry yourself too much over that.”

Jack sounded so _small_ as he admitted, “I just don’t want you to hate me. Or be mad at me.”

_I hated_ and _was mad at you for ten whole years and you managed to survive_ , Pitch thought with a snaking of resentment. And he was nearly about to say as much – the growl of a, “ _Jack_ ,” leaving his throat before his eyes darted to the spirit and the angry response petered out like a weak flame on his tongue. Jack was staring at him again, all cold eyes and some relative of that miserable look he’d had on his face back in the tavern, and Pitch felt like introducing his own face to one of the brick chimneys on the next roof over.

_Why does this even matter to him?_ Pitch thought as he rubbed the bridge of his nose between two thumbs. _It_ shouldn’t _. I am perfectly capable of functioning normally around and with the people I despise, so it wouldn’t be as if the idiot would be actively put out by my hatred._

A moment later, Pitch had to re-evaluate that thought. Because if Jack was really only interested in face-value harmony for the sake of a comfortable environment while everyone was at Yves’s, then Pitch highly doubted the spirit would experience such a flux of moods whenever things did or didn’t go his way where Pitch was concerned – the misery from before, the hurt and the happiness from that morning, the anger and the desire from yesterday.

He also considered it a testament either to the spirit’s roaring earnestness or his own decaying senses that his paranoia wasn’t in the mood to doubt the sincerity of any of these expressions – and frankly, Pitch wasn’t either. After all, he wasn’t going to go through that irritating guilt for a second time by completely misreading the spirit again.

Pitch released the bridge of his nose to scrub his fingers back through his hair. Once he was sure the growl would not enter back into his voice, he stated, firmly, “We indirectly discovered yesterday that I do not dislike you enough to want you dead, and if that is my conclusion after having spent a decade seething over you ruining my plans, then I doubt being scratched and yelled at will make a dent in my opinion of you.”

The spirit just looked at him for a long moment before saying, quietly, “You didn’t deserve it.”

Pitch refused to let those words sink any further below his skin than they needed to, and hummed, letting the low, thoughtful sound resonate down his windpipe and ward off anything unwanted. He recalled the epiphany he’d experienced mid-conversation with Yves, the idea that maybe Jack was hiding quite an accumulated stash of skeletons in his cold little closet, and murmured, “That’s debatable.”

Jack’s expression hardened, his mouth turning down as if he was prepared to fight Pitch on the subject. But with an angry little sigh, he merely turned from the king and sealed up a gaping, crumbling hole in the roof they were stomping over with ice. There was an identical, symmetrical hole in the side of the next roof (a product of the same explosion, probably), and Jack’s ice went ahead and bridged the gap between the two.

The spirit stomped across the ice, practically radiating his anger, and Pitch smirked at the irony of it all as he followed along behind Jack.

The new rooftop was scattered with dozens of chimneys that were various sizes and angled so strangely that the Nightmare King deeply questioned the integrity of whatever architect had tried to design the place. There was even one protruding from the side of the house, stretching up higher than all the rest, and this one in particular was glared at harshly by the man.

It wasn’t long, though, before the sensation of burning and slicing pain ghosted over Pitch’s tongue, and his attention snapped back to the spirit on the other side of the roof. That bleeding, flaming fear was back in his chest as he dragged his staff across a metal railing. Strangely enough, the fear was more prominent than before, its presence sharp and tangible. A few smaller fears were beginning to manifest beneath the glass, curling and unfolding and linked, in a way Pitch could _feel_ but not articulate, to the churning mess above them.

Ice began pouring out of the staff and across the rusted metal, and Nightmare King forgot to censor himself before he asked, “What are you thinking about?”

Anger apparently dismissed for now, Jack looked at him in surprise, and Pitch immediately bit down hard on his tongue. Damn it, he hadn’t meant to say that out loud – he should be _tactical_ about this mess, for goodness sake – but the fear was just _there_ and…

…and the spirit was complying, mumbling, even as his eyes returned to the railing, “Something Ren said, about the Holomire.”

Still a little mad at his own stupidity, but content with Jack’s simple answer, Pitch’s mind took it upon itself to kick up into a cracking storm.

_So I was right? That burning mess is Jack’s fear of the Holomire, the fear of what he has no memory of, a fear I can extract sensory impressions from but no real memory –_

He scraped his tongue under a canine as the fear in Jack’s chest sharpened for a moment that was so distressing the spirit’s ice exploded and engulfed the entire section of roof the railing spanned.

And all of Pitch’s mental processes, which had been rapidly collecting together what he knew of the glassy fear, were reduced to: _How volatile._

“Your Nod barman?” Pitch absently presumed as Jack gingerly backed away from the destroyed railing.

“Uh, yeah,” he muttered, distracted by his ice and whatever was making the fears in his chest pulse erratically.

_What a strange fear_ , Pitch thought as he glared at the spirit’s chest. _Despite having so much stimulation this morning, it hadn’t been anywhere near this sensitive._

What had that annoying little barman said to Jack to make it so touchy?

It took a few minutes for Jack to snap back to himself. The fears in his chest eventually started to quieten their throbbing, and in a bit of a daze he migrated over to Pitch’s side of the building. He wove between chimneys and when the fears finally settled back into their usual modes, showed off some of his newly-regained balance by leaping atop one of the chimneys and managing not to fall into it. “Yeah,” Jack repeated, this time with a little more enthusiasm, “the small one with the feathers.”

“The rude one,” Pitch corrected, forcibly removing his glare from Jack’s chest as the spirit hopped off the chimney.

Jack gave him a wry smile. “You met him?”

_As well as witnessed him poisoning you._

“Unfortunately. Has your hand fallen off yet?”

Jack grimaced, glanced down at the bandaged limb. “It’s still attached for now. Hopefully he’ll fix it up if I ask him later.”

_He’d better_ , Pitch thought as his scowl cut low. “How you’ve survived interactions with so many blatantly hostile tribes is beyond me.”

The nudge was subtle, barely noticeable, but still the flames engulfing the glassy fear burnt brighter, hotter. For the first time, the flames began to rain down and burn the smaller fears beneath it. “Doubting my strength in battle?” Jack dared, expression barely even flinching as his entire chest turned into some pyromaniacs wet dream, and it _annoyed_ Pitch that Jack was stupid enough to forget that he could _see_ what was happening with him.

The Nightmare King’s molars gnawed on the inside of his cheek. That fear... and all the tiny ones dancing beneath it… something about the way it was reacting made Pitch feel uneasy. There was almost a restlessness to it that had never been there before – something Pitch was sure of, since he would have noticed such an odd quality – and it was reacting so violently to the lightest of nudges.

Had Jack’s not-so-friendly mental commentary returned already? Was it prompting the fear somehow?

But…no, Jack didn’t seem like he was fighting with anything at the moment. Noticeably, at least. And Pitch hadn’t noticed anything like this before… well, right now.

_But if I pry a little harder and find out that Phoenix was wrong and Jack_ attacks _me…_

He was probably being overly cautious about this, but what Tanton had hypothesised would eventually happen to the wolves – that whatever had buried the false memories would return to restore them, driving everyone into a state of delusion and panic bordering on insanity – was a threat Pitch believed was horribly and deviously likely.

And if _something_ had happened to Jack during the time he’d been separated from Phoenix in the forest – obviously not the same something that triggered the wolves and North’s workers into their rage, considering Phoenix was resolute that Jack hadn’t entered into the same frenzy, but something similar enough that caused him not to be “himself” after the incident – then Pitch trying to stir the pot might be the catalyst for some sort of nasty turn.

And Pitch was by no means in any shape to fight an unhinged spirit with endless cold.

But on the other hand, if he didn’t do anything about this, Jack was likely just going to continue on their inane little conversation with that _thing_ burning in his chest and Pitch was the _king_ of _fear_ , he was even getting a little buzz off this weird fear, but the spirit was already trying to manage one lot of inner turmoil and –

Fuck. If that thing was still there when those voices came back – if they weren’t already back – then the spirit would probably be even more unstable than he potentially already was.

_And I’d told him I would help_ , Pitch remembered with a touch of acidic self-depreciation.

“Well?” Jack prompted.

Pitch threw him a dark look and cut straight to the chase. “If you don’t want to talk about what’s bothering you, you don’t have to try and distract me.”

Jack looked startled at the accusation, and practically _panicked_ when Pitch walked off without him. “I – it’s not –” He groaned and ran to catch up with the Nightmare King. “You didn’t seem interested this morning.”

_My boots weren’t, but I was_. “I can be disinterested now,” he uttered.

Their eyes met, and Jack’s knuckles turned white on his staff.

_Come on Jack_ , he mentally taunted. _Just spit it out._

Eventually, small but determined fingers pinched at sleeve of Pitch’s coat, and the king stopped for the spirit. “No, you don’t have to be disinterested,” Jack murmured. “I’m just not use to talking about this stuff. It… it was all so long ago that Phoenix is the only other person who knows it all, and he’d rather gouge out his eyes than ever reminisce about it.” He tried to laugh, failed miserably, and let go of Pitch nervously. “This is gonna help our understanding thing, yeah?”

The spirit flicked a finger between the two of them, and Pitch’s own fingers flexed. “If you want it to.”

His tone was bored, his standard curiosity-concealing inflexion, because he couldn’t deny that the part of him which could not stomach cagey behaviour and unsolved mysteries wanted to know everything he could about the mess he was now tangled in.

As he kept reminding himself, Pitch was an adaptable man, a strategist, and a conqueror, and _so_ _fucking_ _help_ _him_ he could do something as simple as sating his nagging curiosity and Jack’s spazzing fear simultaneously.

_As long as I keep an eye on him, I’ll probably be able to knock him out if he_ _begins to have some sort of psychotic attack._

So, with such a magnificent plan in place, Pitch turned and presented the spirit with his full, disinterest-feigning, _looming_ figure – because the best answers were always extracted when one was looming.

Unfortunately, Jack didn’t even look fazed by the fact that he was being dwarfed – but Pitch figured the quality of story would not be diminished. The small collection of fears beneath the burning glass were now bolder, more noticeable, and danced in the snow and fire rained down by their overlord. Pitch could identify one or two, and nearly laughed at the absurdity of a particularly warped fear – one that indicated that Jack was more afraid of what Pitch was going to think of him than the man he was actually telling his secrets to.

The words that left Jack’s lips a moment later confirmed Pitch’s translation. “And you don’t care about the shit I’ve done, right?”

Pitch let the half-baked amusement sitting in his chest tumble from his mouth in the form of a low, dark chuckle. “I literally have not the slightest interest in your morals, Jack Frost.”

Jack licked that damn cut again – and if Pitch didn’t know better, couldn’t see that it was a gesture of uneasiness, he would have sworn the spirit was doing it for the sole purpose of trying to _distract_ him – and looked away from Pitch. “Well that, uh, that’s good I guess. So, I – after I had finished my solitary meditation as a monk of you know who” – he pointed up into the empty sky, and although the “solitary mediation” meant nothing to Pitch, the Nightmare King offered a vague nod to indicate he understood the “you know who” as his ever-watching enemy – “I was a part of something. Not a very good something. Well, mostly not very good. Sometimes it was nice, to be a part of a family. ‘Course I couldn’t remember any of my human past so it was the first time for me. But we did… bad things. Bad enough that Ren wasn’t even _listening_ to me when I said that we didn’t hurt the Holomire –”

He paused, his expression twitching in frustration, and scrubbed his good hand over his face. Pitch dug his own fists into his pockets and watched the spirit’s fears clash and stumble. The name of that Nod irritated the Nightmare King on a level he really didn’t want to explore much of, and a reflexive bite made its way onto his tongue before he could stop it. “I’m the one listening to you now.” Jack’s hand fell from his face, blue eyes wide on Pitch as he ordered, “Continue.”

A small breath punched out of the spirit’s lungs, and he nodded, a tiny gesture, and tried again. “On the day we met them, we – the five of us, there was five of us as well as –”

Jack’s words faltered, and Pitch felt a sharp pinch of fury as the lotus formed beneath the dripping glass structure in Jack’s chest. It wasn’t there long, thankfully – just long enough for the other fears to get impaled by unfurling petals and the fire to curl down the rising stamens. Then Jack was breathing, forcing himself to inhale shallow little breaths that really didn’t sound very calming but helped the lotus decay nonetheless. He realigned the focal point of his story with some mental force and Pitch let his anger settle into the back of his throat.

The spirit’s words began to tumble out a little faster. “We got told that we were invited to the Holomire’s forest for some conference thing. None of us knew anything about the Holomire so we were like, yeah whatever, and we rocked up outside the forest’s borders like a good little bunch of guests. On time and everything. And the second we got let through the wards, we were greeted by a bunch of spears from the Holomire’s guards and glares from the fucking standing armies all the other asshole warlords had brought with them as security. They disarmed us – took all our weapons and marked up our skin with the grossest ink to make sure we couldn’t use any of our elements. I was lucky I looked scrawny enough that they didn’t bother with me, just took my staff. Phoenix said the ink took weeks to scrub off.”

Something strange crossed over Jack’s expression then, and Pitch tensed. But Jack’s eyebrows merely furrowed, no psychotic episode in sight, and he huffed out a, “Hah, I haven’t thought about this stuff in so long. It feels like the first time I’m remembering it properly. Anyway, the guards walked us to their main shrine in blindfolds and locked us in a foyer while all our bosses had their big-men-talk in the shrine. And once they yakked for hours and we nearly got executed because some other bastard underlings were messing with the Holomire’s idols, we were told to leave and we…we did.”

There was silence for a few long moments. “And?” Pitch eventually prompted.

Jack looked at him. “And what?”

_Ahh, so that was it_. Well, that answered one of Pitch’s problems, but that fear was still there, unaffected by Jack’s little tale, so Pitch asked, with a touch of caution, “What comes next?”

Jack’s eyes widened. His gaze dropped to his feet and he searched the roof they stood on for a while, digging, Pitch assumed, until mumbled words finally left his lips.

“A gravestone. A – her grave. Phoenix was sitting next to me, crying. He didn’t… have any of the ink or anything on him. And I looked at him, and he finally stopped and he _hugged_ me.” Icy, terrified eyes rose. “I’m missing something, aren’t I?”

Pitch didn’t even have to answer his question for the spirit to keep talking, fear growing and convulsing and his breath shallowing with each pound of his heart. Jack was so _visually_ progressing through his revelation, and the Nightmare King moved a little closer to the spirit to make sure Jack wasn’t about to lose his mind altogether.

Because even if Pitch’s underlying concern was wrong and there was nothing supernatural about Jack’s memory loss, poking at what was so obviously repressed (or hidden in a dense pocket of static) was still dangerous. He didn’t want to _break_ the spirit accidently just because he nudged a little too hard.

_Not in this way, at least. And definitely not by_ accident _._

“Why?” Jack was muttering. “And why haven’t I noticed this before? I don’t know – I don’t know how Valkyrie died, I don’t know –” Pitch’s eyes narrowed when that lotus returned again, even if its visit was brief. “Phoenix told me they were both dead and I’ve just been _believing_ him this whole time and I mean I _do_ believe him but I don’t _remember_ and I should because I was there, right? I’ve never even… I’ve never even questioned him about it. Why haven’t I ever –?”

The spirit’s breath caught, his chest stilling, and Pitch glanced up from Jack’s sternum to see the spirit staring at him with a horrified expression on his face. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

Pitch flinched, completely unaware of what kind of expression was on his face and _kicking_ himself for letting it get anywhere near the surface of his skin. He knew – _knew_ – that his features were a perfect mask of indifference now that he’d gotten a hold of them, but the way Jack was looking at him – “Like what?” he asked, the words bursting from his mouth before he could even try and put some sort of defensive edge in them.

Jack’s eyes popped wide, as if he thought Pitch was playing with him. “Like I’m going to have some episode or something and fucking attack you, the fuck are you –”

Pitch saw it the moment it clicked, and a thick fistful of gunk that didn’t know whether to identify itself as devious glee or sickening dread sank in his torso. Jack’s horrified expression collapsed, settling into mute terror. And then a second later, he drew another connection, and the flames burning through the glass in his chest exploded violently. Jack jerked like he’d been punched and he rasped out a breath that Pitch half-excepted to be littered with flames. “Oh god.”

_Good work, Pitch_ , he congratulated himself, pressing his fingers into his temples, _very tactical. Now all we have to do is wait and see if he goes_ mad _._

His eyes darted around the rooftop only to curse the poorly designed layout because out of the two of them, Jack and his staff could probably navigate this chimney-littered hell better than he could.

He hated having shitty escape plans.

But then the flames in Jack’s chest began to die down, began to weaken and return to their usual flickering form. The flames on the smaller fears dissolved, and Pitch’s attempt at steeling himself for psychotic rage was quickly forgotten. The frost spirit was on the ground, squatting with his staff between his legs and his hands clasped over his nose and mouth. His breathing was still ragged, but his eyes were less terrified now.

_He’s calming himself down?_

Pitch’s knees buckled a little, and he squatted in front of the spirit, ducking his head to watch the fear in Jack’s eyes fade out into something that looked horribly like resigned dread.

“Is that why Phoenix doesn’t want me to know?” Jack mumbled, staring unseeingly at the ground. “Because I – oh god. Ren was right.”

_What was he – oh_. Oh.

Pitch scrubbed a hand back through his hair, and Yves’s voice, warning him not to divulge any information to Jack, rattled through his mind briefly. He was quick to smack it away, though; to be brutally honest, he didn’t give a shit about whatever tentative reason the fire spirit had for keeping this mess a secret. He had no reason to do anything the fire spirit asked of him, and the frost spirit right in front of Pitch was already half proving to him that when Phoenix had said that Jack had a strong mind, the shit hadn’t been lying.

_Everyone should give you a little more credit_ , Pitch thought as he gently – because of the _poison_ , nothing else – pulled Jack’s bandaged hand away from his face.

“Not you,” he said.

Jack’s eyes swung to Pitch. “What?”

In a firm tone, he uttered, “I do not know why you don’t have your memories. But it’s not because of what you’re thinking.”

The spirit snatched his bleeding hand out of Pitch’s hold. “You mean it’s not because I went bat fucking crazy and tore everyone to shreds?”

“No.”

Pitch’s simple, flat answer seemed take some of the fight out of Jack. Relief trickled through his expression. “Did we kill them?” he asked weakly.

The flames, burning with enough intensity that the glass beneath them should have _melted_ by now, wooshed through Jack’s chest on its most virulent of ventures. The little fears, dancing as they burned, twisted strange little limbs up to the grating glass, and Pitch belatedly realised that _this_ was what he had been looking for.

_That barman must have half-convinced Jack that it was his fault._

The Nightmare King rose to his full height and uttered, “Not from what I’ve heard.”

At once, the fire gave one last experimental flicker before swirling out of existence. The smaller fears began to fade, followed closely behind by the dripping glass, as if those five words from Pitch had absolved Jack of his burdening anxiety. Jack’s head tilted to the side, wary but clearly relieved. “They told you, huh? And you weren’t like, sworn to secrecy not to tell me this? Phoenix was pretty adamant that I just remain clueless.”

With all that was happening with the wolves and at the North Pole, teamed with those tiny dancing fears (collectively, the terror of being responsible for the genocide of a fae tribe), Pitch doubted the spirit would have remained clueless for long. And wasn’t it kind of stupid of the fire spirit to even think that Jack would just remain in submissive ignorance until it all blew over?

_Oh, but that was exactly what he had always done, wasn’t it._ Pitch frowned a little as a vague, abstract thought asked him if there was a reason why Jack was willing to question Phoenix about this matter _now_ but not, apparently, for the last hundred and fifty years.

Was it just because of the barman? Because of the inquisition throwing everything in their faces?

His eyes drew to the wound in Jack’s hairline. _Or is it the presence of something else?_

Whichever the case, it also helped that an oath of secrecy had never stopped Pitch from doing whatever the fuck he wanted in the past. “I was, but I have faith in my ability to kill your fire spirit before he can meteor-shower my lair.”

The corner of Jack’s mouth pulled down. “That’s not funny.”

“I wasn’t joking.”

Jack shook his head, amusement barely penetrating his sobriety, and his hands curled around his staff for support. “Is that what happened to the faeries?” he asked, eyes flickering up to Pitch. The Nightmare King gave him a small nod, and Jack exhaled a shaky breath. “I can’t remember any of it. It’s just _blank_ … Is it bad that I’m sort of glad that I have no memory of it?”

Failures in memory most definitely were not a _good_ thing, but Pitch didn’t think Jack was talking about the mental repercussions of having holes in his mind.

Glad, at any rate, to see that he wasn’t going to have to jump off the edge of the building to escape a derailed spirit, and feeling like he’d dipped a few too many toes in the Pool of Thoughtfulness for the time being, Pitch stepped away from Jack. A little too easily – a reflex, practically – a cruel, “Please do not look to me for emotional support,” slid over his tongue.

Jack glared up at him, and then seemed to finally realise the ridiculous height difference between them and pulled himself to his feet. “My emotions do not need _supporting_. I’m processing, you asshole. Ugh, I can’t believe this. That means Ren was right about us leaving separately, and… fuck _fuck_ Val and – they must have never even left the forest –”

Jack kept rambling, the terror never quite returning to his eyes, but a couple of different fears reappeared in his chest and caused the spirit to twitch nervously. Names that Pitch didn’t recognise fell into the smoky air between them, and eventually, when the turnover of fears was happening too quickly – so quickly, in fact, that Pitch didn’t have enough time to identify them before they were replaced with another lot – he interrupted with a bleak, “Are you going to be alright?”

The spirit’s mouth opened, then closed. He frowned and said, “Didn’t you just make yourself very unavailable for that sort of conversation?”

Pitch’s eyes narrowed, and Jack immediately rolled his eyes. “I’m not going to lose my shit, if that’s what you’re asking. It would have been nicer if Phoenix had just _told_ _me_ this morning – or even that day in the graveyard. I guess he must have a reason, though.” He groaned, grumbling to himself a little further, before his hands dropped to his sides and he glanced over at Pitch with a smirk that suggested a range of trouble. “Thanks for putting your lair on the line to tell me.”

The Nightmare King – an adaptable man, capable of strategy and war and conquest and honed in the art of manipulation – was stunned into absolute fucking _speechlessness_ for a gaping moment. Jack’s smirk grew positively wicked in Pitch’s ten seconds of floundering, and the older male spluttered a furious, “That was _not_ what I had meant –”

His objection was drowned out by the sound of Jack’s laughter, the notes of amusement made coarse by the barest hint of ice, and Pitch sighed, heavy and absolutely _done_.

But he was turning into a fool, apparently, because when Jack, still in the midst of his chilling fit of laughter, urged Pitch on with an insincere apology in his eyes and a grin slashed across his mouth, Pitch grumbled low curses at him in languages he knew the spirit could have no knowledge of.

Yet he still followed on.

Crossing over to the next roof proved to be a feat in dusty acrobatics – some demolition work had seen that the rooftops and highest floors of both houses were literally a single pile of rubble, connected by a larger pile of rubble, and Jack seemed to see it fit not to bother with the slick but dignified bridges he’d been building thus far. He slid down a piece of concrete, and Pitch grudgingly followed through the dust and protruding bits of metal.

_“Did we kill them?”_

Pitch coughed a little, and Jack, wiping away tears that had been left over from his obnoxious glee, glanced at him. “What I asked before,” the Nightmare King muttered. Jack’s hand paused, the spirit’s expression taking on a wary shade, which shut down completely when Pitch added, “About what you and your ice are capable of.”

Jack looked away, and promptly turned on his heel and headed off toward the back of the building. The path in front of them was more or less blocked by a pile of debris, but at the back of the townhouse was a bunch of rickety scaffolding offering a dubious path to another, less-damaged roof. “What of it?”

The brisk answer irked Pitch somewhat, but he ignored the irritation. He still wanted an answer to his earlier question – even if Jack might have already given it to him with his dancing fears, Pitch wanted to _know_ if the image forming in his mind of the frost spirit, an image so different to the Guardian-esque idea he’d always had, was as close to the real thing as he absently hoped. “It had nothing to do with the Holomire,” he clarified, watching a string of tension in the spirit’s shoulders unwind. “The smith just mentioned something about you yesterday, and it made me curious.”

Somehow, the idea that the smith knew anything about him didn’t seem to surprise Jack. “What did he say?”

“That there were people who feared you.” The spirit glanced back at him, fingers curled around a freestanding wall of crumbling concrete. Pitch recalled the fear he’d seen in those raiders Jack had scared in the tavern, and added, “Apparently there still are.”

Jack’s eyebrows pinched, pained, and he turned back to his new path. “It’s not me, though.” He tapped a rusted leg of the scaffolding with his staff, shooting a reinforcing layer of ice down the pole and across the majority of the framework. He turned back to Pitch and twirled the staff in his good hand. “It’s this. It’s Boreas. I’m just a spirit with a stick and access to the power.”

Pitch couldn’t contain his snort as he took a cautious step onto the structure. “I think you’re lying.”

Jack laughed – a cold, nervous, sad little sound, and he didn’t try to fight Pitch’s words as he followed the man onto the scaffolding. “I wish I was lying. I wish it was a lie. What you said about my face or whatever.”

Pitch glanced down at the spirit, who was lightly walking at Pitch’s side as they crossed the creaking, cold wood. “Your eyes.”

A cold dusting of purple scattered across the spirit’s cheeks. “Yeah, that. I – I _hate_ what I’ve done, Pitch,” Jack admitted, his voice cracking in what could only be shame. “I know you might be able to blow through cities like they mean nothing, but I didn’t want to hurt the people I did. I never wanted to. It was – it was the other reason why I never agreed to join you. Because you were promising pain to everyone and I have no room to _judge_ you for that but I didn’t want to be a part of it myself.”

_Looks like I’d been right about all those skeletons_ , Pitch thought as whatever doubts he might’ve still had about the spirit concerning that day in Antarctica were suddenly given their last rites and shoved out of his mind altogether.

“You didn’t kill those faeries,” he replied, mostly to make sure the volatile version of that Holomire fear didn’t return.

Jack sighed. “I wish I _knew_ that, though. I mean, what if Phoenix’s memory got fucked with too and his story is wrong? I don’t want to add a whole realm of faeries onto the list of things I’ve destroyed. It’s a long enough list already.” The spirit swallowed, exhaled a quiet breath, and whispered, glumly, “You must think I’m so pathetic.”

And wasn’t it just a testament to how well Jack had wormed his way under Pitch’s skin that the Nightmare King had nothing but neutral consideration for the spirit. If it was anyone else, he’d probably be laughing at their weak attempt at villainy – at, yes, how pathetic their whining sounded.

But there was barely a bone in Pitch’s body that felt like mocking the spirit at that moment, and if it had something to do with Jack’s offering of forging some sort of understanding between them, well, that was for him to yank his hair out over later on.

He raised a brow down at the spirit and said, “You have a lot of unpleasant things to say about yourself.”

In a small, bitter voice, the spirit murmured, “It doesn’t help when they keep reminding me of it.”

The scaffolding tipped, snapping under their combined weight. Jack was quick to absolutely smother the wood they were standing on and everything beneath it in strong, durable ice, and Pitch thanked him, silently but _deeply_ , because he really didn’t want to risk having his shadows completely ignore him in favour of letting their weak king fall four stories to certain bone-breakage.

Because, in all seriousness, he would not be the least bit surprised if another round of mutiny was in his immediate future.

After a cautious moment spent feeling up the rest of the walkway, Jack waved Pitch on, sparing only the tiniest of smiles when he saw the way Pitch had a tenuous grip the railing. With a glare, the Nightmare King cracked his hand off the metal and stalked on after the spirit. 

Working the chill out of his hand, Pitch watched as Jack skipped off the end of the platform and swung down onto a metal staircase bolted to the back of the townhouse.

_“I’m not stupid. I’m not pathetic. I’m not weak…”_

Pitch’s boots hit the metal stairs, and he eyed the spirit trudging up the steps ahead of him. _You better hold onto that determination from before, Jack, because I don’t think you’re any of those things but I also don’t have the delicacy to deal with fragile spirits._

“I –” He twitched when the spirit immediately spun to look at him, and focused his gaze onto the half-buckled steps he was being led up. “From day one, I was built for war. My default setting is to translate everything I see into what is useful and what’s not. I can obliterate civilizations because that’s what I’ve always done. That is how I am.” He met the spirit on a small landing, and his eyes flickered briefly to Jack’s. They were a little wide, a little astonished, holding the same gleam of brightness they had that morning when he’d spoken of his old sword. “You are not like me.”

They scaled the rest of the steps in silence, Jack digesting this new information (and probably still suffering from indigestion from the last lot).

When they reached the roof, Jack brushed past Pitch, nudging the Nightmare King with his shoulder as he spun and said, “I bet we have more in common than you ever thought we did. Mutual love of Skreeklavic Shadowbent included.”

Dark eyebrows danced, and Pitch just shook his head. “There is a lot more that is different between us, Jack.”

The frost spirit’s smile was small and sly as he murmured, “I wonder.”

 


	20. Bravery Dwells Alongside Fear (Part II)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Jack and Pitch have a Moment on a creepy rooftop, the tavern becomes even more chaotic than before, and the gang hauls ass out of the fae realm in style.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was promised a chicken divan recipe for this update

Their new roof was truly a sight for sore eyes – with no gaping holes, piles of rubble, or questionably positioned chimneys, Pitch approved greatly of what was laid before him. The rooftop had once been some sort of garden, and a deathly stillness had grown over everything within its bounds in its carer’s absence. There were wooden frames filled with barren soil and trellises covered in rotted foliage. A garden bench sat between two dead bushes, the pair nothing but sticks now, and pots of dead flowers sat around a statue of a woman cupping her hands over a concrete tub that Pitch guessed used to be some sort of small pond.

Jack was already investigating their findings, trailing between the buckets of soil and small planters with a kind of easy curiosity on his face that Pitch realised he hadn’t seen in a while.

_Usually it isn’t long before his forehead pinches and his mood turns._

“Are they still gone?” Pitch asked, his voice soft but still heard across the small roof.

Without glancing up from the vine he was inspecting, Jack nodded. “Yeah. It’s quite.”

“Have they done this before?”

The spirit turned to Pitch then, and took a moment to consider the question. “They were fairly silent until Halloween, I guess.” The tongue flicked out briefly to touch the cut on his lip again, and Jack’s voice dropped a little when he added, “They went really quiet when we kissed.”

Before he could stop himself, Pitch exhaled a little laugh. “That’s a dreadful pick up line.”

Jack grinned, slow and easy with a hint of something so dangerous that Pitch’s amusement was cut off at its knees. “Really?” Leaning some of his weight against his staff, he ran his tongue across his bottom lip, a gleam that was absolutely evil darkening his eyes as he purred, “You’re such an amazing kisser that the voices in my head shut right up while you have your tongue in my mouth.”

The words, his tone, that fucking _dangerous_ look in his eyes, had the most absurd and irritating heat blooming in Pitch’s gut. He was old enough to be more than immune to shit like this by now – and he’d figured he was, since whenever Jack had spat this sort of rubbish at him in anger, he’d felt nothing but _rage_.

_But apparently not._

The Nightmare King ground his molars together. The hunger rumbled back into life and coaxed him with some garbled sounds and a tug, deep in his gut, to cross the rooftop and bite that smile right off the spirit’s face.

His hands balled into clenched fists. _I am not some fucking animal getting led around by the nose by this damn spirit._

Planting his boots with whatever was left of his rapidly decaying self-control, Pitch gritted out, “Still dreadful.”

The spirit’s flirtatious smile faded, but Pitch knew that he hadn’t taken the Nightmare King’s words to heart – there was still a flicker of heat in those eyes, enough that the ice was beginning to melt and pool, and Pitch should have been annoyed that the spirit had seen straight through his grumbling, but he really _really_ wasn’t.

“You said they hate me,” Pitch added, a feeble attempt at getting the conversation back onto some helpful thread – a thread that wouldn’t have him reconsidering denying that hunger.

After a short, thoughtful pause – spent half-glaring at Pitch, the Nightmare King noted with a raised, challenging brow – the spirit turned back to his plants and muttered a, “Yeah, nice,” which Pitch pretended not to hear. His fingers ghosted over brown, dried leaves and everything he touched disintegrated instantly. “They rag on you sometimes, like this morning in the stables. It’s so hard to concentrate with that rattling around in my brain. But normally they just talk shit about me. It gets annoying. But I can deal with that, you know? I can take the internal monologue. But it’s just them fucking with my emotions that stresses me out.”

Pitch believed him, if from the slight quiver in his voice alone. With the hunger and his irritation uncurling, his boots carried him through the dead little rooftop garden until he could see a new fear in Jack’s chest. A sliver of gold, twirling, collapsing, piecing itself together. There was nothing particularly malignant-looking about it, but Pitch wasn’t about to be fooled by it.

“I meant what I said before,” Jack murmured as he replaced the leaves that had dissolved at his touch with delicate replicas made of ice. “About leaving. They would probably be happier if I did.”

Pitch’s shoulder met the extended, cupped hands of the statue. He regretted the move a moment later when he saw some sort of strange, green fish thing sitting in the little bit of water left in her hands, three beady eyes blinking at him from the small, murky pool. Taking a large step away from the creature, he scowled at the back of the spirit. “And if they aren’t.”

“Then it doesn’t matter right? I’d be out of your hair so you wouldn’t be forced to worry about it.”

As true and potentially peaceful as that scenario would be, Pitch was about as averse to it as he had been back in the tavern – which was too much, for his liking, but still a significant amount. “I’m not worried.”

Jack gave a little exasperated sigh – and how _dare_ he, really, when Pitch was trying to _help_ here – as he turned to face off with the Nightmare King. “Your _pity_ , then. I know helping stray spirits with mental issues isn’t on your qualifications list, and if you’re just doing this because I’m going to be a hindrance, I’d rather someone else just man up and dig out my brain and make them shut up for good.”

Instant rage tore through Pitch’s ribcage, streaking a line of charred innards from his gut to the base of his throat. A growl vibrated through his chest, the spirit’s name a curse on his lips, and whatever feigned indifference Jack might have been sporting was flung from the roof the second Pitch’s expression registered.

Jack nearly stumbled into the planter box behind him as Pitch stalked over, stopping just a hair’s breadth from the spirit’s stupidly stunned face. His eyes tilting at a dangerous angle, the Nightmare King snarled, “I am not worried because you are an irritatingly determined spirit. So stop sulking and if you don’t agree with them, don’t give in. No one is digging out anyone’s primary functioning organs. It’s unhygienic and it’ll make more than the voices you’re hearing go permanently silent.”

_Having me give enough of a damn about you and your problems to help try and_ fix them _is a waste of my time if you die in the process._

Jack blinked at him, stunned and frankly looking quite torn between fainting and throw himself into Pitch’s arms. The Nightmare King had all of half a second to gravitate back a step, in case his words were about to – the darkness help him – invoke some sort of passionate response. But Jack opted for neither option. Pitch had barely rocked backwards when a smile, riddled with charm, lifted the corner of the spirit’s mouth and Jack simpered, “That might’ve been the sweetest thing you’ve ever said to me, Pitch.”

Pitch’s brows pulled low, and although he had been dreading an emotive outburst, his fibres disagreed hypocritically and profusely with how _casually_ Jack was taking his remark. But then he noticed that the flush had returned to Jack’s face, and something that was a mixture between relief and pleasure was threading through his eyes. Pitch stopped trying to escape the spirit’s space and instead rocked back into it so he could see that silent gratefulness a little better.

He murmured, “Not one word of that was meant as a compliment,” and watched as the spirit’s eyelids fluttered closed.

He was close, close enough to _smell_ the spirit – to smell fresh cold and new rain and blood – and a thought struck Pitch, slow like a fist coming at him through water, of how _easy_ it would be.

Pitch only had to move a few inches to knock his forehead against Jack’s, to tilt the spirit’s head back so their lips could meet. Jack would probably moan for him – such a delicious sound – and open up that cold little mouth to let Pitch do whatever he wanted with him. He could use the spirit, ravish him, expend whatever fascination Jack seemed to have with him until he was sated.

His hunger was vehemently in favour of the thought, and a rush of starving, clawing lust tore through Pitch’s abdomen so fucking _painfully_ that he tipped forward without thinking, his nose bumping against a cold familiar. The spirit’s breath hitched, but Jack didn’t move.

And neither did Pitch.

All of his bones locked into place, and a cold sweat broke out across the back of his neck.

Because he was a strategist, a conqueror, a manipulator – he worked and he functioned for the sake of his grand schemes, of his world-destroying aspirations and his own advantages – and he _did not_ follow wonky little spirits around fae rooftops all the while having to fight off something as obscene as _hunger_ whenever he got too close. Coupled with tonight, he’d felt this same starving need that morning and last night as well, and he’d _relished_ in it while he’d had Jack trembling under his hands.

But Pitch’s impulses knew how to control him as effectively as they wreaked havoc through his touch, and he knew the start of something bad – the sprouting of a seedling, young but already embedded with the DNA to create deadly, poisonous thorns – when he felt it.

And this _hunger_? This was definitely a bad seed.

And it was all Jack’s doing, like everything else, because the spirit just had to go and jam a wedge between Pitch and his wonderful, sturdy self-control –

“Pitch?”

The Nightmare King flinched, and he jerked back from the spirit watching him with worried eyes. He wanted to snap something harsh at Jack, bite words at the spirit that would make that worry dissolve into hatred.

_“I don’t hate you.”_

_I bet I could change that if I tried hard enough_. The thought was dazed, a little manic, and Pitch turned from the spirit and walked over to the back of the pale statue to get himself out of Jack’s vicinity. He sat himself down on the huge stone slab the woman herself was kneeling on, his back against her falling hair, and dragged fingers almost painfully through his own. An ache was rippling through his torso, an echo of its former pain, and Pitch nearly cursed when Jack entered his field of vision.

_He has this whole rooftop to stand on – all this space – why does he have to come over_ here _–_

“If I say something weird, will you try and choke me again?”

The earnestness of the question was hidden beneath that teasing jab, but it did not go undetected, and Pitch sighed at the sound of it. To at least _seem_ like he still contained a shred of composure, Pitch brought one of his knees up to his chest to lean his elbow on it, letting the other dangle off the edge of the stone slab. He kept his eyes on Jack, on the way he was shifting anxiously in front of the king, and dared that aching lust to return again.

_Control, calm._

“Depends on how weird it is,” he deadpanned.

Jack glanced down at the ground beneath his feet, then decided to sit his ass down at the base of Pitch’s slab of stone. His back was against the hard rock, and his shoulder knocked against Pitch’s boot as he made himself comfortable.

The staff twirled, and Jack’s head tipped back against the edge of the slab. “I wanna try something.”

Pitch eyed the head of white hair, now settled between his legs. “Does it involve more of your ice? Because you’ve made enough of a mess in our wake as it is –”

Jack spun around. “No,” he groaned. “I mean like, getting along with each other. You know, slumber parties, fishing trips. Doing stuff. You gave me your big bad speech on Halloween about being grumpy and on your own warpath, but has it changed at all?”

_This again?_ Pitch gritted his teeth. “It hasn’t.”

Jack’s shoulders sagged, and the spirit turned back and settled against the stone once again. Pitch could practically smell the disappointment on him, and he licked his lips.

_I could leave it like this_ , he thought, eyes still fixed on the messy mop of white. Keep the bond stagnant, throw a roadblock in the way of Jack’s Understanding.

But he was here to help the spirit, wasn’t he? Primarily the wolves, but now also Jack, and what was the point of holding the irritating spirit at arm’s length when Jack was either going to try, continuously, to worm his way closer, or Pitch was going to have to reach out to him for the sake of saving him from his injured mind.

And besides, it would be excellent practice for keeping a lid on that fucking _hunger_.

So, grudgingly, but truthfully, he added, “But some spritely idiot did yell at me the other day and now I am not sure where he fits in that picture anymore.”

Jack tensed. Then, slowly, tilted his head back to look up at Pitch. “Someone had the nerve to yell at _you_?” he teased.

Pitch rolled his eyes. “Yes, I know, shocking. What do you want from me, Jack?”

He allowed the question to exit his mouth with a stamp of approval because his paranoia would probably try and light him on fire if he proceeded any further into this mess without finding out what Jack was looking for.

Especially since, for as long as he’d been on this absurd planet, whenever anyone had shown Pitch anything other than animosity they had always wanted something from him. Allegiance, power, secrets. This one villain (because only a fucking villain would be so _bizarre_ ) had tried wooing Pitch for three whole months, leaving flowers and _half-eaten animals_ outside Pitch’s lair until the Nightmare King had had enough and finally strung the creep up by his toes and found out that all along he’d been after Pitch’s eyeballs.

Freaks.

_Though, I doubt Jack is interested in my dwindling power supply, or my organs._

The spirit in question was back to fiddling with his staff again. “I… don’t want what you were asking for in Antarctica. A partnership. I don’t want to help you destroying anything. I just…” That tongue remerged to trace the cut on his lip, his eyes wandering back over to his frosted vine as he thought. Pitch caught the beginnings of a familiar fear carve its way into Jack’s chest – rejection, with its piercing blades and cauterized mouth – and he nearly tipped his toe forward to nudge the spirit into talking.

But fear wasn’t going to keep Jack silent this time, and icy eyes rolled back to Pitch. “Would you be angry if I said I wanted a fresh start?”

_A fresh…_ Pitch’s head tipped back against the statue as incredulity gnawed its way through his internal organs. Nobody had ever asked him for anything like that before – usually, his exchanges with other people were so rotten there was never any room left for forgiveness let alone wiping the slate clean – but then again, Jack had been doing a lot of things the people from Pitch’s past had never tried.

_The apologizing, the smiling, the kissing, the fucking effort he keeps making to be –_

To be _what_?

The Nightmare King buried his hands back into his hair. “ _Why_ ,” he ground out. “If you’re doing this out of boredom or morbid curiosity, I could do without the distraction while I am trying to prevent a werewolf army from spiralling into madness.”

_I could do without you trying to scratch your way under my skin and –_

“Tell your paranoia that it’s neither of those things.” Pitch slid his wrists out of the way of his eyes so he could glare down at the spirit, who had turned where he sat so he could properly stare at Pitch. “You’re interesting, Pitch,” Jack said quietly. “And sometimes a little bit cool. And for all the smack you talk, you’re not entirely despicable. I mean, you didn’t just walk right back out of that bathroom the second you saw I was hurt. You did the same thing this morning.”

The words stung, like a knife had been jabbed right into the cluster of weaknesses he’d been exhibiting since last week. And the _confidence_ with which Jack was saying these things was rattling – usually there’d be some sort of question tied in with a statement like that, a bout of anger or some harsh muttering. A moment of hesitation Pitch could use to his advantage.

_Am I seeing the difference of not having the voices here already?_

But, mental peace or no, Jack was wrong – Pitch _was_ despicable, he was a villain, and whatever was making him act in any way contrary to how he was supposed to be, well, it would right itself eventually. He hoped. Pitch swallowed, letting his hands drop into his lap, and growled down at the spirit, “They are all temporary character flaws, I assure you. Don’t expect them to be permanent.”

The spirit’s head dipped until his expression was masked by his hair, and Pitch felt Jack’s face nudge against his boot. “That’s fine,” the spirit murmured.

Absurdly enough, the words surprised the Nightmare King, and then proceeded to thoroughly unsettle him.

The spirit’s compliancy… whatever he was trying to forge between them, it was temporary?

He bit back the scoff that tried to work its way up his chest. _Well of course, this has to be temporary. Our lifespans are ridiculous; permanent attachment is more than unreasonable._

So if this… if this was promised an end, a cut-off day wherein Pitch would have done what he wanted and sated the spirit’s interest, his own itching inclinations, he would be able to live normally after that wouldn’t he? He could make the final decision and scrape the spirit out of whatever corners he’d managed to crawl into and drag a knife through any strange amicable association he’d ever had with Jack.

It would be like his old business deals – reasonably friendly one second, then cold the next.

He was familiar with that. He could _do_ that. And Pitch was the one calling the shots, wasn’t he? Because Jack had laid all his cards on the table and implied that it was perfectly fine for Pitch to swipe them all off and onto the floor whenever he regained a sense of his usual disposition.

If it was only for now… he could indulge in that hunger.

No, not indulge. He already knew what happened when he let his impulses have more than a healthy say in his choices – they became twisted, overpowered. But he could dabble in it, flesh it out, see how far he could push its limits before it tried to control him and then claw it all back until the hunger was obedient.

He’d done it with the others – the bloodlust, the pride, his rage – so maybe this would be a good exercise in reminding himself of how strong he could be.

Of what kind of king he used to be.

With, of course, the added bonus of being able to coax the frost spirit into _melting_ for him.

Resolve pinched at his limbs, urging him to follow through with his decision, and he moved the leg dangling off the edge of the stone, dislodging Jack’s face and causing the spirit to grumble something not entirely kind under his breath.

_He still looks so tired_ , Pitch thought when eyes filled with cold, hard ice looked up through pale strands of hair to give the Nightmare King an ungrateful look. There were bruises under those shards of ice, dark veins and exhaustion.

_Wake up, Jack._

Tentatively, because Pitch was a destroyer of worlds, not a cultivator of bonds, he reached down and collected the spirit’s face with his hands, running fingers across the soft skin just beneath Jack’s jaw. The spirit’s eyes popped open in surprise, his gaze falling to the wrists brushing along his cheeks before he looked back up at Pitch in confusion.

And, maybe, a dashing of hope.

He let his fingers curl around Jack’s neck, up into the spirit’s hair, and with little warning or tenderness, Pitch dragged him up until their foreheads collided and he could feel Jack pant out a surprised curse.

He pulled Jack closer as the spirit flailed, trying to get a hand somewhere for balance and find a place to put his knees while his staff knocked against the statue above them. Pitch enjoyed watching him squirm, but more than that, he enjoyed the cold that spread from Jack’s skin to his own, the startling difference in temperature that, although Pitch would never admit it out loud, was just a little bit soothing.

His nose carved a warm line up the spirit’s, and Jack released a shuddering breath as the flush Pitch seemed to like so much was drawn to the surface of the spirit’s face.

Somewhere inside of him, the hunger hummed and spread fingers made of pure heat through Pitch’s abdomen, begging him to drag Jack into his lap and tear into him. To bite and to mark like he had that morning. Pitch breathed out through his nose. Jack was beginning to tremble, confused and still with nothing to hold for balance, and Pitch decided to focus on that instead.

“Do you want this?” he murmured, drawing the spirit a little closer and forcing Jack to settle some of his weight on his staff. He was leaning over Pitch now, his body a taut arch as the Nightmare King watched him struggle between keeping his eyes open and on Pitch and letting them fall closed. Heat blistered through the veins in Pitch’s wrist, urging him to move, to take. He wanted to run a hand down Jack’s throat and over his torso and see how responsive Jack could be for him. If the strain of Jack’s stance would buckle, if the spirit’s heart would pound and break ribs for him, if his lungs would tear open and –

Pitch’s fingers dug a little harder into Jack’s skin, and he had to squeeze his eyes shut and tell his bloodlust to fuck off before he scared that delicate blush out of the spirit.

_Damnit, was this always so difficult?_

Jack swallowed audibly, the sound drawing Pitch’s attention back to him, and despite the spirit’s precarious position, he seemed to choke on something that sounded suspiciously like a laugh. “For someone who’s emotionally unavailable, you’re thoughtful about this sort of stuff.”

_I have several impulses here telling me not to be, so you better be grateful_ , he thought in reply. Aloud, though, he snarled, “Answer my question or I’ll throw you off the roof.”

Jack shivered, and collapsed forward until a hand was pressed into Pitch’s thigh for support. As Jack moved, Pitch held their faces so close, yet not enough for their mouths to meet. The spirit made a small noise when he realised as much, and when he consciously tried to close the distance between them, Pitch’s fingers squeezed, just hard enough to make Jack wince.

The hand on Pitch’s leg took more of the spirit’s weight, and Jack’s weak attempt at humour became breathy. “That’s not very thoughtful of you, Pitch.”

Blue eyes, dazed and but still with a bite in them, flashed at him and Pitch had to work hard to keep the smirk off his face. The gravel in his voice, however, was not as easy to remove. “If you would rather take a dive –”

But Jack needed no more threats. With fingers clawing into Pitch’s thigh in case the man actually _did_ try to throw him off, the staff found some sort of home amongst the waves of the statue’s hair. With his newly freed hand, Jack took the lapel of Pitch’s coat and tried to yank him closer – to absolutely no avail – before he groaned and words began tumbling from his mouth, pleading in the most perfect way. “Pitch, you absolute _bastard_ , I want to kiss you so badly I will literally die if you don’t let me go – I’ve been stalking you all fucking day what do you think _nngh_ –”

With stabs of painful heat curling up his inner thigh and a satisfied growl rolling through his throat, Pitch surged forward and swallowed down the rest of Jack’s words, reducing the spirit to a trembling mute as his eyes finally fluttered closed.

_This could be my new solution for that rambling problem_ , he thought absently. He tugged on the back of Jack’s hair, angling the spirit’s head so Pitch could pry open the cold, hurt mouth and find his way inside.

The moment Pitch’s tongue licked across Jack’s, the spirit made a low, desperate sound and his _taste_ – so cold yet so light, like a chill skimming delicate fingers over napes and noses, but never hooking deep enough to brittle bones – made Pitch’s hunger rumble in contentment, in desire. Jack’s legs began to wobble.

_He needs to be closer._

Pitch’s hand ghosted down over Jack’s hip, tracing bone and laces and the old, worn material of his pants as he returned the spirit’s hold by curling his own hand around the spirit’s thigh. He pushed fingers beneath the tightly wound strings and urged the trembling limb closer, beyond the edge of the stone slab. Jack obeyed with a broken little whimper. He allowed his leg to be manhandled up, his knee hitting the stone beside Pitch’s hip as the Nightmare King dragged him closer, _closer_ , until Jack was straddling him and Pitch was prying Jack’s hand off his thigh so he could draw the spirit flush against him and feel the shudder that tore down Jack’s spine.

The Nightmare King exhaled a breath of tension that the spirit instantly inhaled with a small, shallow gasp, before diving back in for Pitch’s mouth like he was starved for it.

_Closer_. The demand vibrated through Pitch as Jack’s cold fingers danced along the back of his neck, keeping his face close as the spirit sank his weight back onto Pitch’s legs. Pitch followed him, his fingers knotted in the ties around Jack’s thighs, tugging, urging, but the spirit was too lost in the kiss Pitch was thoroughly ravishing him with to even notice. It wasn’t until Jack tightened his grip on Pitch’s coat, when Pitch started to feel the pull of the spirit’s weight, that he realised he’d bent the frost spirit nearly parallel to the block they were sitting on.

_Fuck, he’s flexible_. He backed off a little, mainly to keep the warmth spearing through his veins at a steady, controlled simmer, but also to prevent either of them from doing something as silly as tumbling onto the roof from over balancing.

Not quite as determined to be of any help to the former issue, the spirit moved with Pitch and fell against his chest as he settled back against the statue. Pitch didn’t have enough time to wince – his chest evidently protested the spirit’s weight against it – before Jack was chasing after his mouth without even waiting for a breath, and the pain morphed into an ache that felt a whole lot like the one the hunger had left behind earlier. Heat pooled low in his abdomen, and the hand that wasn’t burying into Jacks’ thigh raked down the spirit’s back, pulling him in deeper.

Jack made a small sound, something low and appreciative that moved through Pitch in a way sound really _shouldn’t_ , as his lips move inelegantly, filled with hesitance but thoroughly eager, and the _clumsiness_ undid Pitch a whole lot faster than he appreciated. Summoning some miracle form of restraint from within him, he pressed two fingers into Jack’s hard stomach, jolting the spirit away from him with a curse, and took a second to catch his breath.

Jack’s eyes cracked open to peer at the Nightmare King, and for a strange moment the spirit tensed up. He was heaving, practically, his breaths loud and Pitch could imagine his pulse hammering against the pale skin along the side of his throat. Before Pitch could even think to ask why Jack was looking at him like he’d seen a ghost, before he could ask himself if it was even any of his _business_ , before he could feel a hot rush of frustration in case the _voices_ had _returned_ , Jack seemed to roll the tension from his shoulders and just like that, it was gone.

_He looks… happy? Yes, that is definitely some form of happiness. So they’re probably not back yet._

Pitch stared at the male sitting across his legs, and with a cold still lingering on his lips that he took a moment to savour the taste of, much to the distraction of the spirit, he murmured, “You kiss like you have no idea of what you’re doing.”

Jack blinked at him once, and then, if it was even possible, his flush darkened. The frostbitten hue spread to the tips of his ears and down his neck, and Pitch’s finger itched to trace the edges of the embarrassed shade. And he did just that as the spirit spluttered, “You’re not meant to say that to the guy in your lap.”

Pitch felt the colder-than usual skin beneath his fingers, and Jack shivered, his head tilting toward the touch. “I just expected you would have at least _some_ technique in store for me.”

Not that he really minded. It was just… curious.

“I…”

Pitch rocked forward, and pressed his nose against the marks he’d left on the spirit’s neck that morning. Jack was starting to breathe far too evenly for Pitch’s liking, and he was glad that the position hid his smile as he heard Jack’s breath hitch. “What?” he pushed.

“It-it’s not like I’ve had a lot of practice,” the spirit mumbled. “To have any technique. I don’t –” Jack made a pained noise, something between a whine and a groan, and Pitch’s eyebrows, if he had any, would have been sitting in his hair.

Pulling back, much to the spirit’s clear disappointment, he gave the male a dubious look. “Are you trying to tell me that you haven’t kissed anyone before?”

Jack said nothing, couldn’t even meet Pitch’s eyes, and at some point during that damning silence the Nightmare King barked out a harsh laugh. “And you expect me to believe that?” he challenged, and the daggered look Jack replied with told him that yes, yes Jack _did_ expect Pitch to be that gullible. Pitch’s fingers flexed on Jack’s thighs, trying to decide whether the hunger was still simmering or if he was ready to throw Jack off him yet. Jack’s own grip on Pitch’s coat tightened in retaliation, and Pitch couldn’t help but smirk a little. “Not too long ago I had a charming conversation with your tiny barman, and he gave me a very different impression of your experience level.”

Jack’s expression shifted from resentful and resolved to downright horrified before it twisted, suddenly, and Pitch watched as a dark and resigned bitterness crept into the spirit’s rapidly cooling eyes. “You don’t have to kiss what you fuck,” he muttered, blunt and dull, and Pitch felt the hand on his coat and at the back of his neck fall away.

The comment made Pitch’s curiosity roar into an upright position, like some reanimating corpse in those weak horror movies humans frightened themselves with, while his hunger lamented the fingers leaving his skin.

_And those weirdoes gave Jack the job of being the_ fun _Guardian?_ he thought as he instinctively tightened his own hold on Jack. _He’s got enough cynicism to rival me on my good days._

“It’s usually considered good manners to,” he replied conversationally, and felt a stab of irritation when it didn’t even put a dent in the prickling darkness leaking out of the spirit’s eye sockets. “No? Well, if that is how you’re used to doing things, I suppose we can disregard basic etiquette as well.”

He shifted the spirit’s weight on his legs, prepared, if his plan didn’t work, to throw Jack off and use the new awkwardness between them as leverage so they could finally return to the tavern – Pitch was a man of plans, after all. But there was no need. As soon as Jack tipped, his hands shot out to Pitch’s shoulders and buried themselves in the fibres of his coat, his eyes widening in alarm as he hurriedly stated, “I don’t want that.”

_Oh?_ Distinctly remembering an angry little frost spirit yelling something very different at him back in the tavern, Pitch’s eyes narrowed, and Jack swallowed as the Nightmare King uttered, “Despite your words from earlier?”

Jack didn’t even need prompting to know exactly what Pitch was referring to, and his eyes dropped as he asked, “Are you mad about that?”

“Remotely,” he hedged, because obviously he knew now that he could no longer attribute every hostile thing that left the spirit’s mouth to Jack’s disposition alone. But the way Jack was looking particularly guilty as he stared down at his fingers, now ghosting down the front of Pitch’s coat, made the Nightmare King think that this was not going to be one of those the-voices-made-me-do-it scenarios.

“I – I didn’t mean it.”

Only a tremendous weight of tactfulness, cultivated alongside his patience over his lifetime spent on this stupid planet, stopped Pitch from rolling his eyes at the statement. “I know that,” he said mildly. “So why did you say it.”

Jack’s reply was a long, dead moment of silence wherein his mouth opened _three times_ to convey some sort of message to Pitch before it shut for good. The Nightmare King waited on him until the spirit began to shift, to twitch, and a fear began to unfold in his chest.

A fear that looked a lot like that damn lotus.

Sighing, Pitch grabbed Jack’s chin and forced him to meet his eyes. “I’ll say this now, then. Whatever it is that you want between us, I will never touch you again if you try to play me like that. Dubious consent is not one of my kinks – you will either beg for my touch and mean it or stay away.”

With guilt washing through his expression, Jack’s chest heaved, just once, and Pitch was absolutely _not_ ready for the crack in Jack’s voice as he started apologizing: “I am _so_ sorry, I –”

Pitch clamped a hand over his mouth before both of them could be submerged into some emotional moment. By some mercy, it didn’t take long for Jack to sense Pitch’s resolve to do anything _but_ continue this conversation, and the spirit reluctantly let most of the remorse bleed from his eyes.

Pitch let go of his face, and before Jack could try and speak again, ran a thumb across the spirit’s mouth. Gently, aware that the cut was looking rather angry after their previous bout of kissing, Pitch brushed the pad of his thumb across cold flesh before pushing past the spirit’s lips and asking, “Your inexperience with this – do I take it as the truth?”

Jack accepted the redirection of the conversation without a struggle, but there was an intensity in his eyes that never seemed to ebb. When Pitch flickered a look up to them, the ice caught him by the throat and even all of Pitch’s oh so loved composure couldn’t save his breath from vanishing somewhere in his windpipe.

Then Jack opened his mouth, his jaw dropping and granting Pitch’s thumb access to the teeth and tongue behind his lips. Pitch’s eyes strayed back to the spirit’s mouth, to the canines sharp against his skin, to the way Jack tilted his head just bit, and the wet, cold touch of the spirit’s tongue trace across the length of his thumb.

“Not completely inexperienced,” the spirit murmured, and Pitch couldn’t have held down the shudder that coursed through him if he’d tried.

He didn’t even care anymore, he decided. He wanted Jack to crawl back to him, closer to him, and he had to work hard to keep his touch soft as he pulled his hand away from Jack’s mouth and sank it back into his hair.

_Closer_ , he wanted to growl. _Let me taste you again_.

But he had to maintain a shred of dignity, so a distracted, “Oh?” left his mouth as he pulled Jack back toward him.

The spirit’s lips had barely met his when Jack said, so softly it was barely audible, “I kissed you, didn’t I?”

And then Jack began to move again, pressing his chest against Pitch so the Nightmare King’s head tilted back against the statue and the spirit could breathe and try to break Pitch fucking open with those hesitant touches of his lips. So, understandably, it took Pitch a long moment of moving his hands from Jack’s hair to his ribs and down to claw into his hips for him to realise exactly what Jack had said.

And what it meant.

Shock had the Nightmare King jerking the spirit away from him. “You –,” he started, not even sure what he was meant to _say_ to something like that, and closed his mouth before he could look like a fool.

Jack was on his knees, looking just on the twitchy side of nervous as he watched Pitch come to terms with the very questionable life choice the spirit had made last night.

He felt Jack flinch, realised that his fingers were probably leaving marks on the spirit’s hips, and looked up at Jack’s face without loosening his hold in the slightest.

“Ask me.”

The spirit tilted his head, a confused, “Ask you what?” leaving his mouth.

Forcing a sliver of control back into his voice, Pitch demanded, with an evenness in the lowest tones of his words that quite adequately hid the way his voice was itching to slip into a growl, “Ask me to teach you. Because you are downright awful at this.”

Jack’s eyes widened, and then Pitch saw a smile twitch at the corner of his mouth. He raised a deliberate eyebrow at the man holding him. “I’ll have you know that I am severely injured –”

Pitch smirked. “It’s not because of the split lip.”

Jack snickered, a low, “At least I tried,” dispersing in the air between them as the spirit pried Pitch’s hands from his hips. He sank back down so they were at eye-level, and Pitch saw a brand of mischief in Jack’s expression that reminded him of the night of cheating and playing cards at Yves’s, of standing in front of him that morning in the stables as he offered Pitch _more_.

A cold hand splayed across Pitch’s abdomen, and the muscles beneath the spirit’s fingers twitched as Jack leaned his weight into the touch. He held perfectly still as Jack smiled and ducked his head to brush his nose along Pitch’s jaw. The man exhaled a breath, and the brush of soft, cold lips fluttered against the sensitive skin below the hinge of his jaw as the spirit murmured, “Will you teach me how to use my mouth, Pitch?”

Pitch swallowed, _felt_ Jack’s fucking grin against his skin, and slid a little steel into his voice as he threw back, “For something other than rambling.”

A laugh, low and breathy, chilled his neck before lips touched Pitch’s ear. “For something other than serenading you with my beautiful voice,” the spirit whispered, and a moment later he licked up the shell of Pitch’s ear.

A shiver tore down the side of Pitch’s neck, and he nearly choked on the low sound that tried to work its way up his throat. He tangled his fingers in Jack’s hair and hauled the spirit away from his ear before Jack could actually ruin him. There was a sinister little smile on the spirit’s face, as if he knew _exactly_ why Pitch was cutting him off, and the Nightmare King appreciated the sight of it more than he should have.

“Since you asked so nicely,” he bit, but his voice was rough even to his own ears, and the sound of it made Jack’s smile spread into a full grin.

But, of course, they were having their strange moment of flirting in the middle of a politically dire trash heap, which both males were reminded of when somewhere, off in the near distance, an explosion rocked through the downtown streets. The roof Pitch and Jack had found trembled in the aftershock, groaning and creaking in a way that a structurally sound building really shouldn’t, and Pitch’s hands clamped onto Jack’s legs when the spirit nearly lost his balance.

Jack squinted through the darkness, but Pitch could see clearly the plume of smoke cascading out of a building that was altogether too close for his tastes.

He was about to say something to Jack – something abstract and vague, but which would point out that they should really get back to the tavern before the rebels or the Imperials engaged in something that Pitch was altogether unequipped to survive through tonight – when he looked at the spirit and noticed that Jack had entirely lost interest in the building slowly falling to pieces a couple of blocks away. His eyes were staring down at Pitch’s hands on him, the grin gone as cold fingers wrapped in a stained bandage touched Pitch’s knuckles. He was confused for all of a moment before he felt Jack trace the raised red welts on the back of his hand, and dip down under the cuff of his coat and shirt until he reached the beginning of his tattoo.

“I didn’t mean to hurt you,” Jack said softly as an emergency siren whirled into life.

Pitch considered those words for a few minutes, listening, absently, to the droning _whirr_ screaming through the districts and the distinct sound of Imperials shouting in alarm. “Did they tell you to?” he eventually asked.

Jack’s hand flinched back from him, and with a startled look on his face, he vehemently shook his head. “No, no, they were just talking and talking and making me feel so mad. They hate us but they don’t tell me to hurt you or anything.” He paused, and his shoulders seemed to sag a little. “You were thinking about that, weren’t you?”

“Not too deeply. I know how to defend myself if you try to stab me.”

But Pitch’s answer only seemed to upset the spirit. “You’re taking all this really well,” Jack said in a small voice.

“Practice,” was all Pitch said in reply, was all he truly _meant_ as his reply, but Jack took a whole lot of meaning from that single word, and Pitch didn’t have time to be startled before Jack’s expression crumbled.

The ice in his eyes collapsed, cracking and splitting and drying out into a painful wasteland, and the spirit exhaled a hurt laugh. “I – hah.” He pushed at Pitch’s hands until he could stumble off the stone block. “I told you I wasn’t one of them.”

The desolation in his voice and the fear in his chest made it clear that Jack wasn’t trying to argue with Pitch. A little unsure how their conversation had taken such a wretched turn so quickly, yet nearly positive it was entirely due to his lacking delicacy, the Nightmare King knocked his head back against the statue as Jack paced and any residue happiness fled his eyes.

_He’s drawing his little red line again_ , Pitch thought as his eyes tracked the spirit, watching him scrub his hands over his arms, scratch fingers over his neck, flex and stretch that bandaged hand until he couldn’t move it at all.

_At this rate…_ “Jack –,” Pitch started, prepared to lunge for the stupid spirit and make him stop before he pumped poison into some vital organ.

The sound of Pitch’s voice made Jack flinch, and without even looking at the man, the spirit turned on his heel and stalked around the stone block to collect his staff from the statue. “We should get back to the tavern,” he said, quiet and cold. “If the rebels are up to something, the Imperials might start doing those surprise raids they always seem to love.”

Pitch’s eyes narrowed, and then turned into furious slits when he noticed the awkward fuss Jack was going through to avoid unhooking his staff with his hurt hand.

Fine. If he was sick of talking, then Pitch could deal with that. He always felt a bit more stable without Jack chattering through his good judgement anyway. But the cold that had leaked back into Jack’s eyes had taken the form of something harder – like iron coating an ice sculpture, forever locking in its form – and the sight of it royally ticked Pitch off.

_I_ bandaged _that fucking hand, the least he could do is mention the fact that it was now practically paralysed._

As Jack groaned, annoyed, probably, at his inability to do something as simple as alert Pitch to his bodily agony – or maybe it was because his staff was adamantly refusing to be rescued, it could really have been either – Pitch reached up and nudged the curve of the wood with his knuckle. A chill sank straight into his bone as the staff was dislodged, but it didn’t take him more than a moment to work the cold out of his finger.

The spirit thanked him, quietly and grudgingly, and Pitch ignored the grumbling as he threw his legs off the side of the stone block. He dusted off his coat as Jack refused to make eye contact with him, and the second he had cleansed his coat of any lingering filth, he swooped in and crowded the pouting spirit against the side of the statue.

Jack blinked at him, and in a low, even, and frankly ruthless tone, Pitch said, “When we get back to the tavern, I am going to scare the living shit out of your Nod barman and you will get that hand _fixed_.”

For the briefest moment, the first reaction that flashed across Jack’s face was pure fear. And Pitch didn’t know what on this sordid earth that meant, nor did he have enough time to look down into Jack’s chest before the fear was gone and replaced with what _should_ have been the spirit’s first reaction: astonishment.

And then attitude.

“Even though I’m just another one of your psychos?” Jack bit back, the hurt slicing through the words reducing the retort to something a shade more desperate.

Pitch sighed. “That is not what I had meant.”

The spirit seemed to chew on his tongue for a few moments, looking less than convinced but apparently willing to believe in Pitch’s words if his small, hopeful, “Really?” was any indication.

Pitch simply glared at the spirit in reply – a glare Jack thankfully translated as some sort of affirmative. And so, with Jack looking a little calmer, and Pitch himself feeling certain that if he was to suffer through another second of sentimentality he might actually break out into some sort of rash, the Nightmare King swept an arm toward the scaffolding and the irritating spirit gave him an inelegant curtsey before leading the way off the rooftop.

 

Their walk back to the tavern was a little faster than the journey away had been, and, though Pitch would never admit it, tinged with substantially more paranoia. When it was clear that neither Jack’s immobile hand nor whatever damage he’d done to his head had impeded his ability to walk at a swift and cracking pace, Pitch and his paranoia had both of the males hustling to avoid whatever headache was roaring into life between the rebels and the Imperials on the other side of the district.

It might’ve made him look like a coward, but it had been a _long_ day and Pitch was thoroughly _not_ prepared to immerse himself into a faerie brawl tonight.

Thankfully, though, the pair made it to the ice-slicked road outside the tavern without becoming political casualties. Aside from the tell-tale breadcrumb trail of ice, Pitch could tell that they’d nearly reached their destination thanks to the fact that, a whole _block_ away, he could hear the racket emanating from the wretched hovel of an establishment – the darkness help him, there was even a _siren_ blaring in the distance, and he could _still hear them_.

But above that, through all the noise and commotion and _urging_ from his paranoia to just _keep moving_ , the sound of Jack yelping, high and startled, cut straight through the external din. His boots fixed themselves to the dirty footpath, and Pitch glanced back and saw, to his shock and growing apprehension, that the spirit had slipped on his own ice and was now half on his knees as he clutched at his head.

_Fuck_.

Jack’s eyes were wide, his shoulders shaking. The bandaged hand was curled in his hair along with the other, the spirit apparently too far gone to even _notice_ how painful that should’ve been.

And then the flickering shard of gold in Jack’s chest, a fear that had been shimmering for a while now, vanished.

Pitch froze and Jack winced, curling in on himself as his fists tightened in his hair. He began muttering, mumbling, and Pitch forced himself to turn around and make his way back to the spirit.

“– told you that I’d make you go away – did you think I was fucking lying – if you’re going to scream at me at least make some _sense_ –”

On the pathway beside the spirit, Pitch’s boots seemed to catch Jack’s attention. His muttering slammed to a halt, and the spirit looked up at the same time Pitch extended a hand down to him.

Jack stilled. He looked at the limb Pitch was offering as if he wasn’t sure whether it was going to provide him with the utmost kindness or turn inside out and skewer him in the eyes with the tiny bones in Pitch fingers. Pitch just waited as Jack stared, well trained in the art of patience, until the spirit flinched and dropped his eyes back to the ice he was kneeling on.

_Come on Jack, you said you’d fight this_ , Pitch thought, even as he let his hand drop. He turned to step back, to give Jack some space so the spirit could pull himself together, when he felt a small tug at the corner of his coat sleeve.

_There it is._

With just a brief, gauging glance at the spirit – who looked in the midst of a migraine, but seemed to have enough willpower to keep his only working hand clamped onto Pitch’s coat, his staff pressed into the same palm – Pitch pulled a little, drawing Jack to his feet.

“Breathe,” Pitch murmured.

Even through the screaming of the Imperial sirens, and the roaring ruckus ahead of them, he heard Jack inhale deeply as the Nightmare King led them the rest of the way to the tavern.

 

* * *

 

 

There had been a time in Jack’s life – a terrifying collection of minutes – when he had felt real fire. Licking, burning, _marking_. The heat had been terrible, unbearable – his cold skin even more sensitive to it than regular heated flesh – and it had left him forever after with a wariness of flames.

And yet, the agony that was currently scorching every single vein in his right arm into _charcoal_ was so much fucking _worse_.

He could never remember Nod venom being this potent – although, granted, the last time he’d copped a feel of the stuff, it had been for barely a few minutes before he’d been forgiven and subsequently absolved of his agony.

But _seriously_. Was it because Ren was from one of the noble families in his tribe? Would he even be able to give Jack some anti-venom the same way regular Nods did? Was Jack going to have to cut off his arm – because he was prepared to do it, so fucking help him, if he had to live through another ten seconds of this shit.

_All you do is whine, I swear._

Jack’s grip on Pitch’s coat tightened as they burst into the rowdy tavern. He could handle pain, he could _handle_ _pain_ , but paired with the slowly-dissolving agony in his brain from his thoughts’ triumphant return, this was looking bad. Black spots were starting to eat at the corner of his right eye, and his head would suddenly float right off his shoulders, light and nauseous, in-between thumping pockets of intense pain.

“Where is the Nod?” Pitch growled, his voice low and grounding and Jack unconsciously – barely even _caring_ about any eyes in the tavern that might have been scandalized by the interacting pair (cough, Phoenix, cough) – shifted in closer to Pitch’s warmth. He wanted Pitch to touch him again, he wanted the Nightmare King to destroy the heat coursing through Jack’s arm and the piercing pain in his mind and replace it with his own devouring warmth. He wanted to feel Pitch’s fingers smear across his skin, painful and gentle and distracting and _god_ , Jack just wanted _more_. His legs shook, he wanted it so badly.

But first he had to fix himself – he had to, _ugh_ , pull this pain out of his arm before he snapped and tore the entire limb off. That was why they had come back. So Jack could stop teetering on the edge of fucking _screaming_ because _fuck_.

He pressed his forehead into the wool of Pitch’s sleeve and gritted his teeth as another wave of the scorching pain pulsed, this time just up past his shoulder. The touch made his thoughts slur angrily – the very fact that Jack refused to let go of Pitch had induced a terrible bout of name-calling that Jack had barely been able to ignore – but their strength was waning as the pain continued. Jack himself felt like folding up and hiding under the back of Pitch’s coat just to _escape_ , but he had a feeling that too much needless physical contact might just drive Pitch into a bad mood.

After all, the man had literally _just_ agreed to be sort of okay with being around Jack. The spirit was going to have to work in baby steps, tiny marks of progress, otherwise he was going to scare the grumpy, emotionally constipated man off.

And Jack didn’t want that. Not yet. Not after the miracle that had happened on the rooftop amongst all those dead pot plants.

_What miracle?_ his thoughts snapped.

A miracle he was apparently able to keep all to himself.

“Sucker,” Jack snickered, coughing a little.

A loud thump made Jack look up, and then his eyes dropped to a burly man passed out on the floor in front Pitch. Shadows were retracting from the man’s shoulders, and by the disgusted look on Pitch’s face, Jack guessed the Nightmare King had nearly become the stranger’s pillow.

_The fucker just attracts stumbling drunks, doesn’t he?_ the thoughts croaked.

“The Nod,” Pitch prompted, glancing down at the spirit’s face as the pair stepped over the man’s body.

The memory of the rage in Ren’s eyes had Jack hesitating for the briefest moment – after all, what if he was going to have to _fight_ the Nod just to get a drop of his anti-venom? – before the pain flared yet again and Jack nodded toward the bar. “At the end,” he croaked, “where I was sitting earlier.” As soon as the king started moving, Jack added, “What if he’s still mad? I – I don’t really think I can fight him without destroying the entire tavern.” Not with the way his nerves were fraying, anyway.

“Then I’ll formally introduce myself,” Pitch rumbled, eyes gold and dangerous and Jack felt a little touched at the sentiment.

_Arrogant bastard. Tell him to move it already, fuck this is dire._

If Jack was any greater of a man, he would have considered hanging onto the pain a little longer if it meant the thoughts could suffer through the inferno for as long as his body could stand it. But, as it was, Jack was not made of steel, and the very fact that the agony was taking its toll on the efficiency of the thoughts’ remarks was probably a bad thing. Besides, Pitch looked as if he’d probably punch him if Jack tried to interfere with his Fix The Frost Spirit plan.

A head of fiery hair caught Jack’s eye as they marched through the main bar area, and Jack was quick to let go of Pitch’s coat. Luckily, too, since the moment Jack entered into Phoenix’s immediate vicinity – the heat in the air around him being the dead giveaway – the fire spirit swung around on his stool, bottle of wine in his hand, and pinned Jack with a _where the fuck have you been_ look.

“Where the actual _fuck_ have you been, you crazy bastard!”

Jack startled at the sound of Ren’s voice, at the vehement expression of the philosophical depths of Phoenix’s Look, and snapped his attention toward where the handsome, feathered barman was rolling up his sleeves and stomping toward him like he was about to knock Jack out.

The spirit cast a quick glance toward Pitch, only to see the Nightmare King with his arms crossed over his chest and glaring – potently, that was _definitely_ a hate-filled glare – at the faerie making his way up into Jack’s grill.

“For the love of my gods Jack, I look away from you for two fucking seconds and I hear you’ve left the tavern, did you even _think_ before running out with my fucking talon marks in your –”

Ren’s constant flow of speech, lacking the usual sneer or condescending smile he normally punctuated his sentences with, rendered Jack speechless for just long enough for the Nod to reach out as if to snatch at Jack’s burning limb.

On pure instinct – because the pain was _excruciating_ , and Jack’s coherency was beginning to bleed into the heat – his staff hit the floor between them, a clear barrier, and the Nod blinked at him in surprise.

Then an urgent twitch shuddered through Ren, and with a sharp look, the Nod held out his own hand. “It must be agonising by now. Let me heal it.”

_What are you waiting for?!_

But Jack was trying to _think_ – to remember why on earth Ren, who was usually so _careful_ with his talons, had buried them in Jack’s hand in the first place. It’d had something to do with the Holomire, hadn’t it? They’d been arguing, yelling, Ren had accused him of –

Of killing them. But they hadn’t! Pitch had promised him that they hadn’t hurt the faeries, and why would the Nightmare King lie about something like that? Jack had to clear this up, because it had been – something else, something horrible that had just recently come back for seconds and thirds and shouldn’t someone be _warned_ about it before it could strike again and maybe be as successful as it was with the Holomire –

_STOP THINKING ABOUT USELESS THINGS AND GIVE HIM YOUR HAND!_

“ _Jack_!” Ren shouted.

“I can’t move it,” he choked out, wincing at the onslaught of shouting.

“Then let me touch it,” the Nod urged, this time a little softer.

Since Ren rarely ever used that tone on him, Jack let his staff drop, conceding. He tried to open his mouth to convince the faerie that he’d been wrong, that being the last to leave the Holomire’s forest didn’t mean Jack and Phoenix had _killed them_ , because _goddamnit_ , Jack was _not_ _okay_ with letting people think that he’d murdered an entire forest of faeries for no reason. He had done some shitty things in his life, all of which he could admit to, but he wasn’t about to add more carnage to his collection if it _wasn’t his fault_.

But before he could even try, his thoughts were shushing him like he was some _child_ , and Ren was _touching_ him. The faerie was gentle, delicate, but Jack still felt as if the flesh was slipping off his arm whenever Ren applied any pressure. The Nod rolled up Jack’s sleeve to reveal his wrist – which was swelling and discolouring, grossly enough, into some mottled red-purple mess – and made quick work of shedding Jack’s stained bandages.

Jack had barely enough time to consider, through the pain, that maybe they shouldn’t be doing this in the middle of a tavern – and under the unimpressed gaze of the king of fear standing at Jack’s side, and the fire spirit looking about ready to leap off his barstool and intervene – before Ren’s tongue ran across the wounds on Jack’s palm.

The effect was almost immediate – cool, chilling relief shot up Jack’s arm, and the spirit had a moment to marvel at how quickly Nod anti-venom (their spit, effectively) worked before the wounds on his hand closed and Ren was checking over his palm to make sure he hadn’t missed any cuts. A chill chased through Jack’s arm, spreading from his chest out to the tips of his fingers, and the spirit shivered in relief.

He groaned, a small, thankful sound that drew the attention of the two males crowding him, but Jack barely cared. He’d been isolating the pain for the better part of his time with Pitch, managing to do it well enough until he’d pumped too much of the poison around his arm in his distress, and it was wonderful to feel the healthy cold creep under his skin.

_About time,_ his thoughts annoyingly agreed, and the last flecks of tension and pain trickled out of Jack’s mind.

“Thanks,” he breathed.

Ren glared at him. “You shouldn’t be –”

“Ren!” the waitress in the chainmail dress hollered. “Order!”

With a curse, Ren dropped Jack’s hand and, pointing a finger at his face, ordered, “Don’t fucking leave yet,” before hurrying off toward the bar.

Jack flexed his newly healed hand as Ren dashed away, and when he glanced up at the man looming over him, he saw a strange, half-satisfied, half-murderous look on Pitch’s face.

He felt like poking at it, like asking if Pitch was jealous or something absurd just to see the man’s reaction.

But he was afraid – afraid of the thoughts and whatever commentary they might offer on the subject, afraid of pushing Pitch too far.

The Nightmare King looked down at Jack finally, and with a hint of gold in his eyes, murmured a low, “Better?”

Jack nodded, and wiggled his fingers at Pitch for emphasis. “Better,” he concurred.

Looking a little contented with his job-well-done, Pitch inclined his head toward the bar. Jack glanced over and rolled his eyes when he saw that Yves was now standing next to Phoenix, clearly having just witnessed quite the show, if his smirk was any indication.

“Do we look like we just spent half an hour making out on a rooftop?” Jack muttered to Pitch as they made their way over to the bar.

Pitch snorted and, with a gleam to the silver in his eyes, said, “You certainly do.”

“ _Seriously_?” he hissed, and Pitch just smirked at him, totally evil and unhelpful and _Christ_ , if Skreek was to suddenly appear Jack would never hear the end of it.

But since trying to fix his hair would just make Yves’s judgement burn brighter, the frost spirit had to roll with whatever mussed mess he must’ve looked like. Upon approaching the bar, though, he finally registered the not-so friendly stance Yves had taken against the old wood. He flickered a look to the fire spirit only to see that Phoenix was looking particularly disgruntled as he glared at Yves.

“You want to shuck her off like she’s some _dog_?” Phoenix spat, and Jack automatically migrated toward the spirit in case he had to cool the situation down particularly quickly.

Yves removed his smirk from Jack and Pitch to glare at the fire spirit. “She cannot stay with us, Phoenix. Use your head for once and realise that Lani is a banshee who is currently residing in the _only_ realm that borders the world of the dead. You two –” with a flick of amber eyes, Jack was suddenly very much on the receiving end of the king’s chastisement “– literally picked the worst place to bring her aside from the afterworld itself.”

With barely an acknowledging glance thrown over his shoulder at Jack, Phoenix said, “She’s happy with the piano. You can’t just –”

“Build your own house and have her move in there, then,” Yves snapped.

“Yves,” Jack said, because he couldn’t just say _nothing_ while Yves’s antisocial tendencies were trying to kick Lani out of the house.

“ _What_.”

“We can’t throw her out,” Phoenix objected. “Especially not onto a faerie.” And then his head turned, briefly, to the male sitting on his other side. “No offence.”

Jack slid a curious look to the guy Phoenix had just addressed. The male gave Phoenix a flat look, and in a low voice muttered, “Offence taken,” as the fire spirit scoffed at him.

Feeling a weird sense of unease creep over his skin, the frost spirit turned back to Yves and added, “We picked her up, so we’ll look after her until we find her a good home.”

Looking like a harassed preschool teacher currently suffering through the mutiny of his own classroom, Yves stepped away from the bar, an angry pull in his shoulders, and grumbled something that sounded suspiciously like, “There are too many people in my realm.”

Then he was approaching Pitch’s side, casting a wry glance at the Nightmare King that Pitch instantly raised a brow to. “Gloomy Pitch, the alchemist is not working quite as fast as we would like.”

“Do you need me again?” he asked dryly.

“ _Please_.”

With a last, pointed look at Jack and Phoenix – which Jack ignored, and Phoenix raised a finger in reply to – Yves stalked off toward the stairs on the other side of the bar. Pitch didn’t follow him right away, though. He spent a moment, to Jack’s surprise, scowling as he evaluated the male sitting beside Phoenix. He eventually let his eyes wander back to Jack, where he was met with a curiously raised eyebrow.

_The bastard’s just checking the guy out – he’s got more muscle than you, after all – so stop looking like such a nosy twit._

Jack twitched. He mourned the peace he’d had in his mind during his walk with Pitch, and expressly told himself that the insecurities threatening to fester in the bottom of his stomach were not _real_.

Pitch’s brows sank, and for a fleeting second – so fleeting that Phoenix, who was grumbling into his wine, didn’t even notice – warm fingers touched the hollow of Jack’s throat. They skimmed up over the marks on his neck, letting heat flow back into Jack’s skin – and cold into his face – and Jack felt his wavering confidence gain some solid footing.

Once he was satisfied, Pitch turned and left, trailing after Yves like some menacing presence. Jack pressed his fingers over the heat in his neck until it faded out as he watched Pitch go, the hollow ache sluggishly making its way back into Jack’s gut.

His thoughts made a disgusted noise, and the spirit scowled at himself, and then over at the male who’d given Pitch pause. Sitting by Phoenix’s right shoulder, the guy looked like he’d just been spat out of a knife fight – the leather jacket on his back was torn in the sleeves, there was a strange as fuck pattern on the half-ruined pants he was sporting, and Jesus Christ, were those _snakeskin_ _boots_? He also seemed to be nursing a large duffle bag on his lap, worn and old and looking distinctly like something a military would supply.

Eyes an odd shade of teal slid toward Jack, and the spirit held the guy’s stare until Phoenix finally extracted himself from his own pity party and noticed the world around him.

He sighed as soon as he picked up on the awkward silence in the air and muttered, waving at Jack, “This is the man with joint custody of my child.” The hand then switched to the faerie and Phoenix added, “This guy here defected from the Imperial army and hates wine as much as I do. There, introduced.”

It took Jack a full ten seconds to get over Phoenix’s pathetic introduction and _realise_ what on earth he had just revealed about the faerie. He spluttered, glaring at Phoenix just as the faerie sent him an ungrateful look. “Thanks for that,” the faerie muttered to Phoenix, flickering a look at Jack.

Jack swallowed at the barely-disguised unfriendliness in his eyes. Defecting from the Imperial army was as much of a death sentence as pissing off the inquisition, and definitely _not_ something that should be so easily blurted in the middle of a room full of people – or told to a fire spirit one had just met, for that matter. This guy was most probably wanted by the Imperials for treason, and although the downtown streets were, admittedly, a dark enough place to hide out in, he would have been better off getting out of the fae realm altogether if he wanted to stay alive.

So why was he _here_?

_Says a wanted fugitive also hanging out in the fae realm._

“We’re here for a reason, though,” Jack muttered as Phoenix shrugged, immune to all the glaring going on. The frost spirit wondered absently how much he’d drunk since Jack had been gone.

In an attempt at being nice – because Jack was awkward but not a complete dick, and maybe he was just imagining the tension working its way into their little triangle – the frost spirit said, “She’s not actually our child –” Phoenix gasped loudly, an objection that was thoroughly ignored “– and call me Jack. This guy’s the only idiot who doesn’t.”

The ex-Imperial stared at him for a few moments, appraising him, and thankfully didn’t bother trying to shake the frost spirit’s hand or anything before offering a gruff, “Dom.”

“Nice to meet you,” the frost spirit said, one of his brightest smiles on his face.

“Same to you,” Dom offered in reply, his voice low and muffled by the chaos in the tavern, and Jack sensed about as much sincerity in those words as which existed in his own smile.

Which was not much at all.

Turning from Jack, Dom ducked his head low and muttered something to Phoenix. The fire spirit nodded, eyeing him with the wine bottle to his lips, and the teal-eyed faerie excused himself and headed for the back of the tavern, his duffle bag securely on his back.

_Strange_ , Jack thought as he watched the faerie leave. Aloud, though – because if Phoenix was as drunk as Jack reckoned he was, he was going to be extra prickly about _everything_ – he said flatly, “He’s hot.”

Phoenix snorted inelegantly, and Jack worked his way to the spirit’s other side as Phoenix mumbled, “He… I dunno. He sort of looks familiar? Ish? Could be the wine I’ve been drinking, though. Ugh, there’s been so much wine. But yeah, hot.”

The fire spirit was _definitely_ plastered. “Got the posture of a narc, though,” Jack muttered.

Phoenix snickered, and the base of a bottle jabbed Jack in the ribs. “Look at you usin’ your street talk. Do they even _have_ streets in the wilderness you come from?”

“How do you think I make my way to Douchebag Ville to come visit you? There’s a tour bus and everything.”

“Fucking hilarious,” the fire spirit deadpanned.

A head of dark blue hair flew past them, dumping dirty glasses in a sink and prying cash out of the unwilling clutches of a gangly looking faerie. Phoenix grunted on Ren’s return trip.

“He’s a Nod,” the spirit said, clearly noticing the beads and feathers.

Jack glanced at Phoenix. “Yeah.”

“Did he know her?”

The slurred question had Jack’s heart squeezing a little too tightly, and if he hadn’t been sure before, then he was positive now that Phoenix was drunk as all hell. The frost spirit cleared his throat, and with a small shake of his head, said, “Born too late.”

Phoenix swallowed down that information sombrely, before turning to Jack and raising a menacing eyebrow. “Cute _and_ young? Shit, Frost. I can’t pick your type at all.”

Jack leaned his forehead on his staff, asking himself, not for the first time, why he bothered hanging around Phoenix at all. “He’s not that young,” Jack muttered just as Phoenix yelled, “Oi, jailbait!”

Ren, who, unfortunately, seemed to be forced to work the main bar – by this time of the night, usually anyone who could afford the expensive booze from Ren’s designated area was broke – looked up at the sound of Phoenix’s voice and narrowed his eyes at the spirit. “I’m two hundred years old, not fucking jailbait.”

Jack groaned as Phoenix leered, “Ha, still jailbait in my books.”

As Ren glared, Jack not-so-gently jabbed Phoenix in the thigh with the end of his staff. “Sober up or the guy you’re chatting up will leave.”

But Jack really hated Phoenix when he was in a Mood _and_ drunk, because instead of manning up and taking a fucking hint, he just sneered up at Jack. “You and your fuck buddy gonna make me?”

_Mmm, alcohol does do lovely things to his personality, doesn’t it?_

The sarcastic remark, and the deeper meaning buried beneath it, grated right through Jack’s ribcage, and before he could put a filter on his violent tendencies – before he could put a filter on _anything_ , really – the frost spirit had a hand in the hot strands of Phoenix hair and he slammed the spirit’s head into the bar top.

Phoenix’s forehead hit the wood with a _thud_ and he cursed at Jack as the frost spirit jerked his hand back from Phoenix’s burning scalp.

“You’re being rude,” Jack snarled at him, and somewhere, just behind the bar, he saw Ren fan himself in some mock gesture of appreciation.

Jack pointed a dark look at the faerie – one which was received with a dirty little leer – before looking back at Phoenix, only to see the fire spirit glaring up at him.

His own glare grew cold, and Phoenix laughed. “Oooh scary eyes. Come ‘ere and I’ll burn 'em out for ya.”

Tightening his hold on his staff, Jack took a breath through his nose. “Why are you so pissy?”

“I asked you that this morning, didn’t I?” he snapped back. Jack stared at him, unwilling as all hell to broach that topic when it was _Phoenix’s_ attitude problem they were discussing here, and the fire spirit eventually groaned and rolled his face around on the bar. “When do you get time to come fucking your way through faerie bars without me?”

_That’s_ what he was upset about? A prickle of his fight drained out of him, and Jack admitted, in a softer tone, “When Boreas is angry and I’m sad.”

Phoenix stared at him for a long moment – made longer by the chemicals in his brain, no doubt – before the spirit said, “You should’ve come and got me. I would’ve beaten the bastard up.”

Jack smiled a little, and poked the spirit in the cheek with a cold finger. “Thanks, Phoenix.”

Phoenix grimaced and pulled his face off the wood. “Ugh,” he groaned, rubbing at his eyes, “I’m getting sentimental here, fuck.” He looked up at Ren, who was back to glaring daggers into the fire spirit, and bravely said, “Can I get some water? And none of your glitter-sprinkled stuff, just plain water. Preferably lukewarm. And please don’t fucking spit in it, I didn’t meant it when I called you jailbait. You’re probably well over the statutory limit and you look at _least_ two-hundred and thirty –”

Ren’s glare was getting darker by the second, and Jack thwacked a hand into the side of Phoenix’s face to shut him up before he got himself killed.

Dom, with his questionable choice in footwear – not that Jack could really talk, but still – and that suspicious bag, brushed behind Jack and Phoenix. He sat his bag on the barstool and eyed the glass of water Phoenix was served.

“Giving up already?” he challenged, his voice once again low and barely audible to anyone except the fire spirit. Jack noticed that his expression didn’t really change as he spoke to Phoenix – he had hard features, a straight jaw, and a sprinkling of freckles that were seriously at odds with the stern set of his eyes, one of which was surrounded by several scars – but the faerie had his head tilted down toward Phoenix, his entire body canted in toward the spirit. It was a little… disconcerting.

_Jealous_? his thoughts sniggered.

Of course he wasn’t _jealous_. But… _I guess it’s just been a while since I’ve seen someone other than the wolves flirt with Phoenix_ , he thought.

Drunk Phoenix smiled at the faerie, all intoxication and blatant flirting, and said, “I never give up.”

The ex-Imperial watched him for a moment, before flickering a teal-hued glance to Jack – who was admittedly not being very subtle with his staring – and saying to Phoenix, “Well, I’m giving up for the night. I’ll catch you around, though.”

Phoenix reared up at the statement, clearly distressed at the prospect of the faerie leaving. “I shared my wine with you, you fucking asshole, and you’re just gonna _quit_?!”

Anyone with half a brain would have smacked Phoenix silly at the outburst and left, and Jack didn’t know whether he wholly appreciated the fact that this Dom bloke seemed to have enough of a thick skin to endure Phoenix’s outlandish personality. “Your cheap wine tasted like shit,” he replied, his lip curving when Phoenix bodily reacted to the statement.

“All wine tastes like shit!” Phoenix cried, eliciting a sigh of exasperation from every bar staff in the vicinity, Ren included. “We still _shared it_ though. We forged a _bond_ with _booze_ how can you just –”

“You were just too cheap to buy me a drink,” Dom threw back, slinging his bag onto his back.

“It was more romantic my way,” Phoenix argued, and to Jack’s mild horror, the faerie didn’t disagree. Even worse, he ducked his head down low and murmured something to Phoenix that had the fight draining out of the fire spirit instantly, a cunning smile returning to his face. Jack rubbed his forehead over his staff, contemplating freezing his brain solid so he wouldn’t have to witness any more of this atrocious flirting.

But, luckily for the pained frost spirit and the Nod making small retching motions behind the bar, Dom wasn’t about to let Phoenix have his way by sticking around. Disentangling himself from the fire spirit, he shot a, “Goodbye, Jack Frost,” over to Jack, and the frost spirit looked up in shock to find two teal eyes settled on him.

An unsettling feeling of familiarity crept over the spirit’s spine, curling tiny fingers over the nodes. He gripped his staff a little tighter and muttered, “Later,” as the faerie was already turning to leave.

He chewed on the inside of his cheek as Dom fought his way to the front of the tavern, and then out the door. Phoenix had said he’d looked sort of familiar…

_Phoenix is as drunk as a skunk and you literally brained yourself earlier. Who. Cares._

Well, _someone_ didn’t want to think about the matter too hard, did they?

“Fuck,” Phoenix moaned, turning to Ren and Jack as soon as Dom was gone, “did I scare him off?”

“Probably,” Ren chirped.

Ignoring him, Phoenix looked up at Jack. “Frost you literally have no social skills and you still manage to – _ngh_.” He gestured at Ren with a grunt, and the faerie smiled at Phoenix as he pulled a large knife out of the back of his uniform. “ _How_ ,” the fire spirit complained, oblivious to just how murderous the faerie behind him looked.

“I have charm,” the frost spirit said, eyeing Ren’s knife as it spun through the Nod’s fingers.

“A little bit of charm,” the Nod conceded.

Jack gave him a look. “You’re only saying that because you tried to kill me earlier.”

The knife clattered to the bar top, and Ren sent Jack an unhappy frown as Phoenix growled at them both. “Stop rubbing your fucking foreplay in my face.”

Thankfully returning the knife to wherever it seemed to permanently live on his person – Ren kept that thing on him at all times, and Jack meant _all_ times, it was downright hazardous – the Nod swished around the cupful of wine left in the bottom of Phoenix’s bottle and tapped it on the bar in front of the fire spirit. “Have some more wine and stop being so crabby. It’s a fucking wonder that guy stuck around as long as he did.”

“Was it the whole time I was gone?” Jack asked as Phoenix opted instead for collecting his glass of water and hugging it to his cheek as if it had the power to starve off his loneliness.

“The _whole_ time,” the Nod affirmed, clearly nauseated by the memory. “Where did you fuck off to, anyway?”

There was a waggling of eyebrows – something that Ren, with all his feathers, did not do very well – and Jack levelled a cold look at the Nod. Phoenix, apparently, was just as curious about the matter, and swung around on his stool so he could slosh some of his water on Jack’s pant leg.

“Frost, you left,” he accused, and before Jack could offer some lie as to why, Phoenix waved his hand and flung even more water onto the spirit. “Without even _saying_ anything. Did your evil shadow do something to you? Did he hurt you again? I will fucking deck his gloomy ass.”

Jack sighed, heavily, and froze over the water seeping into his clothes as he reassured the fire spirit with a, “He didn’t touch me. Sit down, Phoenix.”

The effort Phoenix was making to get out of his stool and deliver vengeance was abruptly abandoned, and the spirit pinned Jack with a look. “You lying to me?”

Amidst his thoughts rattling off a venomous tirade against everything Pitch-related, and the oddly observant look he was receiving from the Nod close enough to listen in on Phoenix’s mothering, Jack managed a firm, “ _No_.”

Phoenix didn’t look like he believed Jack, and the grumbled, “You’re always lyin’ about that shit,” didn’t do anything but spur on the thoughts in Jack’s head.

Tired of the judgement, Jack shuffled away from Phoenix, squirming himself into a stool as the fire spirit returned glumly to his wine bottle and empty glass of water. As soon as Jack was seated, Ren, with two hands planted on the bar, leaned in and murmured in Jack’s face, “The Guardians are totally going to fire you when they find out.”

Jack’s forehead tore at the barely seethed remark, and his thoughts latched hold of it instantly, desperate, apparently, to break Jack down in any way they could now that they were back in action.

_It’d be about time too_ , they commented. _You and all those basic fucking morals you lack can just spread your legs for the Nightmare King and become his little whore. Then you won’t have to worry about feeling so unworthy of being a Guardian coz they’ll just throw away your fake title and –_

Pain and guilt and disgust, none of which he _wanted_ to feel, cut through Jack’s insides. With a venomous bite in his tone that he didn’t even _put there_ , he bit, “I can make my own fucking decisions.”

Phoenix side-eyed him from Jack’s right, and Ren’s eyebrows shot up, the feathers on his cheekbones fluttering. “Wow, touchy.”

Jack smacked his head onto the bar and wished for that peaceful quiet again, wished for Pitch to magically poof into existence beside him and distract him from this shit again. “They’re gonna fucking fire me,” he mumbled into the wood.

There was a pained, annoyed sigh. “You are _such_ a loser. Surely they must know about the shit you’ve gotten up to in the past, and yet they still gave you the job anyway.”

The spirit shook his head, and pried his forehead off the wood when he realised how sticky it was. Ugh, he was going to have to disinfect his forehead, wasn’t he? And sterilize Phoenix’s entire face, while he was at it. “I don’t think they know,” he moaned at Ren, who, _really_ , after the whole talon-in-the-hand incident earlier, _deserved_ to deal with some of Jack’s whining. “They can’t. Otherwise Bunnymund would be harping on about more than just how reckless and useless I am.”

The Nod just frowned at him, dark eyes serious as he stated, “You think they haven’t done just as much crap as you? They’re old, Jack. Otherworldly sort of old. You don’t get to live that long without letting a few heads roll to keep your own on your shoulders. And have you fucking _seen_ that big guy’s swords? If they’re on your back about doing dodgy shit they’re a bunch of hypocrites.”

Ren’s words were strangely kind – but, on the whole, not very reassuring. They were a realist’s view of what the Guardians’ must seem like outside their strange little work circles – Ren probably didn’t even realise that Bunny, with all his warrior gear and brusqueness, _cooed_ at his legged eggs in his spare time. They could be badasses when they wanted to, but their hearts…

…were really, really pure.

_Unlike yours._

Jack’s tongue touched the split at his lip, and he raised his eyes to meet Ren’s. “We didn’t do it,” he said softly, wary of Phoenix’s selective hearing.

At the sound of the conviction in Jack’s tone, along with the inconspicuous change in subject, Ren’s expression instantly pinched. With a sigh he said, “I know.”

The frost spirit gaped. “You _know_?”

Looking more than a little sheepish, Ren cocked his head toward Phoenix, who now had his nose pressed against the wine bottle as he whispered, almost in a loving way, a venomous little rant against wine as a genre of drink. “The drunk bastard convinced me, right before he stumbled off and picked up his date.” Ren chewed on his tongue for a moment, before adding, quietly, “Sorry for not believing you.”

Jack swallowed. “Yeah,” he murmured. “Sames.”

The two males shared all of four seconds of eye contact before Ren lost all interest in their sincere exchange. The Nod was quick to shed the earnestness of the moment, and he was as efficient about it as a spider slipping out of an uncomfortable husk. After receiving a tea towel and some orders to clean up more blood at the end of the bar, he said, “Well, when you get bored of the vanilla-as-fuck sex you’ll be having with your gloomy leech, you know where I’ll be.”

Jack gave the asshole a dead look. “You mean here, right? Spray cleaning bottles and being bitter about how short you are?”

Ren threw the towel over his shoulder and, with a smile that was a little too charming to be completely legal, purred, “And jerking off to all my memories of sex with you.”

The line had Jack smirking, just a little, and then groaning and scrubbing his hand over his face when he realised that Phoenix had apparently been very tuned in to that last part of their conversation. As the fire spirit openly glared at both of them, looking rather resentful of _everything_ , Jack muttered to Ren, “The difference between your face and your personality leaves me reeling every single time I see you.”

The Nod licked his lips. “Right back at ya, you fucking psycho.”

The frost spirit’s fingers dug painfully into his cheek as the Nod left him, blunt nails pressing into flesh as he firmly refused to let Ren’s easy comment slide any deeper than it needed to in case his thoughts caught sight of the fodder and had a field day with it. He kept his eyes on the image of Ren melting back into the line of bustling staff, bumping his way to the other end of the bar, and took a calming breath through his nose.

To his right, he heard Phoenix’s stool scrape along the floor as it grew closer, and then he felt the fire spirit slump against him, a hot line of heat running up the entirely of Jack’s side.

“He was pretty,” Phoenix mumbled, snuggling into the curve of Jack’s neck.

The frost spirit winced at the too-warm contact, but couldn’t bring himself to shove Phoenix off him. So he just settled for mussing the fire spirit’s hair, like Skreek always did to him whenever he was miserable, and offered, “You might see him again.”

Phoenix nodded. “He said I could.”

Jack glanced down at the fire spirit, bumping his head with his shoulder. “Then why are you moping?”

“Sad,” Phoenix murmured, and Jack felt something very old fracture somewhere in his chest.

Deciding then and there that he was never letting Phoenix drink wine _ever_ again, Jack arranged them both so he could pull Phoenix off his stool. Although Jack made a pretty good snuggling pillow, if he did say so himself, Skreek always, without fail, managed to yank Phoenix out of these pits in no time at all, and with everything that had happened that day, they could both seriously do with a good dosing of some loud, unruly, smiling company.

And, of course, Pitch.

Jack had barely managed to toss Phoenix off his stool, hands under the fire spirit’s armpits to keep him from falling, when the door to the tavern flew open on a violent wind, smashing against a wall.

And by violent wind, Jack apparently meant a violent _Imperial_ wind.

His heart slammed into his throat, his grip on Phoenix tightening as any patron of the tavern who wasn’t blind drunk was suddenly _moving_ , shouting, _yelling_ as a mob of armour-plated guards filtered into the tavern like ants.

“IMPERIALS!” someone screamed, their voice cutting through the rest of the chaos at the back of the place. Phoenix jerked into a sudden state of alertness, and instantly started cursing his head off at the sight of the soldiers. Drunk, but apparently coherent enough to flee like the wind, Phoenix tore himself out of Jack’s hold and spun to the spirit, grabbing him by the arm so they could haul ass for the stairs leading to the second floor.

“Fuck fuck _fuck_ ,” the fire spirit, lacking any and all composure, screamed back at Jack. “Go, fucking _go_ , Frost.”

But Jack was yanking on Phoenix’s hold, narrowly saving them both from getting cleaned up by a bolting mob of scaled faeries. As Phoenix glared at the passing mob, Jack turned and frantically spied a head of blue hair down the bar. “ _Ren_!” he shouted.

Hearing him, by some miracle, the Nod instantly met his eyes and over the din and chaos yelled back, “I work here, it’s fine! _Run_!”

The Imperials were hollering commands, smashing into faeries with their shields and flattening anyone who tried to leave through the front entrance. They were starting to move forward, to sweep through the tavern like a holy line of fire, and there were too many _people_ in his way for Jack to try and freeze the Imperials in their tracks.

And having Phoenix do _anything_ in his current state was clearly out of the question.

_Unless you want to rot in some more darkness, run you idiot._

“FROST!”

Phoenix’s voice, loud and urgent, snapped Jack into action, and with one last glance at Ren – who was yelling at an Imperial for denting the bar top with their shield, good _lord_ – Jack turned and the spirits bolted for the stairs.

Bouncers missing in action, Jack and Phoenix carved a path through the panicking faeries and dashed up the stairway. The hallways that made up the labyrinth of the second story were tight, a panicky sort of tight, and Jack felt his breath _woosh_ out of his lungs as soon as he remembered how narrow the damn passages were. But he couldn’t let his tightening lungs slow them down. The livid sounds downstairs were slowly making their way closer, and Jack shoved Phoenix on further into the claustrophobic maze before anyone coming up those stairs could see them.

The two of them managed to make their way deep enough into the network of hallways to muffle the sound of the chaos happening downstairs. But it wouldn’t be long until either the Imperials found their way through the place, or the walls crawled down Jack’s throat and crushed all his internal organs, so Jack had more than his heart set on finding wherever the hell Pitch, Yves, and Skreek were.

But where the fuck _were_ they?!

The tavern really needed to commission some sort of map for this place. He’d always had Ren as a guide whenever the two of them had been committed enough to get a room for their hook-ups, and without the guide, Jack felt like he was trekking his way through hell completely, vulnerably, _solo_.

Aside from, of course, _Phoenix_ , the fire spirit who currently had his head pressed into a nearby wall as he tried not to keel over.

Jack swore, his breaths shallow as he tried his damn hardest not to let the walls get any closer, not to let them _loom_ like they were doing. But he was failing, epically, and alone with drunk Phoenix in a rotting hallway, Jack had to press the heels of his hands into his eyes so he wouldn’t start hyperventilating.

“Frost?” Phoenix murmured – an inquiry, Jack gathered from the tone.

“The walls are _literally_ going to eat me,” he choked, refusing to open his eyes. “Do you have any idea what room the alchemist is in?”

Phoenix made some sort of negative noise, and Jack groaned, forcing his hands to drop from his face so he could panic like a true man.

But before he could get a chance to, three Imperials came sprinting around the corner of their hallway and right for them.

Phoenix’s instant reaction, of course, was to burn them alive. And Jack would have probably let him do so – maybe, depending on how dire the situation was – if they weren’t in the middle of a _flammable building_.

The Imperials began shouting at them, orders of “HALT!” and whatnot that made Jack positively bristle, and Phoenix raised a palm toward them and let loose a shockingly large fire ball.

Jack, though, preferred _not_ to be trapped in a burning building, and as soon as the fireball left Phoenix’s possession, he was chasing it with a splattering of ice so cold and sharp it would have most definitely killed the Imperials at the end of the hallway, armour or no.

But murder was not what Jack had in mind. As soon as the ice hit the fire, the elements consumed each other, destroying one another in an angry explosion of thick steam. The grey mist filled the hallway, concealing the spirits who were staring at each other with equally ungrateful looks from the angry Imperials at the other end.

Jack smacked his staff against the wall to his right and erected a solid wall of ice between them and the Imperials before any of them could think to cross the fog-screen the spirits had created. The ice was thick and sturdy, it would do a great job of holding the Imperials at bay for at least a few minutes – and it also did a fantastic job of making Jack’s already tiny fucking hallway _smaller_.

He groaned, stumbling back from the wall he’d created and right into someone standing behind him. The frost spirit shrieked, his heart somewhere near his tonsils because _fuck_ not even _Phoenix_ had noticed anyone in the hallway, and the spirits spun, ready to decimate any Imperial that could have snuck up behind them.

Both of them sagged, though, at the sight of a grumpy Pitch evaluating them both.

“Thank fuck,” Jack breathed, as Phoenix just muttered the, “Fuck.”

With his heart huffing, angry at being so startled, but pleased that in the end it was only Pitch, the frost spirit stumbled over to the Nightmare King and barely reframed from collapsing onto the man in relief.

“How did you find us?” Jack blurted. “This place is literally hell.”

“Your fear,” Pitch murmured, gold eyes intent on Jack, and was that… _smugness_ in his expression? Jack’s eyes instantly narrowed, and Pitch smirked at him unapologetically. “Are you two done here?” he asked dryly. The Imperials on the other side of the murky ice were banging, thumping on the thick but brittle medium with fists and metal, and Jack flinched when he heard an ominous _crack_.

“Totally done,” Jack said quickly, grabbing Phoenix off his wall and slinging the guy’s arm around his shoulders, keeping his hood as a buffer to stop his neck from getting too hot. “I got the drunk, let’s go.”

Without needing to be told twice, Pitch spun with a swoosh of his coat and started stalking swiftly in the direction he’d come from. Too relieved to even bother commenting about Pitch’s dramatic little twirl, Jack hurried after him with Phoenix in tow.

Right turn after left, another left and then a few more rights, and the three of them were rushing through a hallway with a spazzing lampshade and into a room covered in soil. There was a strange tree-looking creature in the corner of the room hurriedly shoving glass bottles into briefcases, and as soon as Phoenix caught sight of them, the fire spirit’s eyes widened in alarm. He made quick work of extracting himself from Jack and dashing past Pitch to literally _dive_ through the open window.

Jack jolted forward, concerned for all of a moment over Phoenix’s safety. But then, from the doorway, he noticed that the world outside the window was entirely too dark to be natural. Upon closer inspection, he realised it was because Yves was waiting outside the window with Skørj.

Who was three _fucking_ stories tall.

“I didn’t know Skørj could do that,” Jack wheezed as he stared out at the skull, its mouth open cavernously wide as dark purple smoke billowed around bone and through the streets. Yves was sitting on Skørj’s forehead, balancing like he belonged in some circus show and not in a ridiculously expensive suit on top of a giant cackling skull, and waved Jack and Pitch on impatiently when he noticed them.

“Apparently it’s the only way to keep the gateway open,” Pitch muttered as the pair of them climbed through the open window. The Nightmare King kept the heavy glass open for him as Jack contorted his way under the frame, and he was reminded, for silly a moment, of having the door to Kitrashin held open for him on Halloween. Of the strange little gentlemanly quirks Pitch seemed to have sometimes.

_I might get to see more of them now_ , Jack thought as he watched Pitch fold himself through the narrow window frame.

_You’re delusional_ , his thoughts asserted. But Jack was having none of their shit while Pitch was here with him, and he drowned them out with a memory – a memory of an agreement to a fresh start, a memory that had him biting at the smile threatening to make its way onto his face. His thoughts had nothing more to say on the topic – too confused, probably, over what they apparently couldn’t remember – and with a relieved sigh, Jack planted his feet on the brick sill.

The spirit stared down into the gaping darkness, their only way out of this hell and into their fresh start, and felt his breath falter a little.

“Close your eyes and jump,” Pitch supplied as he gracefully stepped onto the thin ledge outside the window.

Jack swallowed. “And if I end up impaled on some part of Yves’s house?”

Pitch sighed – groaned, really. “I’ll make sure you don’t.”

_He’s lying._

Shoving aside his thoughts and their snide little comment, Jack’s eyes darted up to the Nightmare King, a pleased smile spreading across his face before he could stop it, much to Pitch’s clear annoyance.

“Hurry _up_!” Yves bellowed down at them.

With the sound of glass crashing behind them and Imperials screaming through the hallways, the frost spirit vaulted off the windowsill and into the dark depths of Skørj’s open mouth, the Nightmare King a menacing and reassuring shadow at his side.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you again for all the kudos and the wonderful comments!! <3 In the next update we'll have some of the Guardians find out about Jack's unconventional housemates, so get super keen ^.^


	21. Win for Me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Pitch refuses to swallow defeat, and our boys have a confrontation in a hallway that gets interrupted by chaos.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I rise.
> 
>  
> 
> Part 1 of the update

Jack broke again barely a week later.

Without a feasible plan, Pitch could do little more than watch, over a progression of days, the rapid spiral that drastically changed the spirit. The twitchiness that became paranoid tremors, the need for fresh air that corkscrewed into a fear of any indoor space. Jack’s mental strength declined at such an alarming rate that within four days Pitch had gone from being able to vaguely sense him around the realm, to being able to pinpoint exactly where Jack was and what he was afraid of at any given moment.

His fears pulsed so brightly and so thickly that whenever Jack was anywhere near him, the Nightmare King could barely focus on anything else.

And it annoyed him – _infuriated_ him, in fact – because lapses in concentration, especially when mining through the heads of werewolves, would end more than just his semi-amicable relations with Skreeklavic.

He violently threw a soaked rag into the sink and braced himself on the kitchenette’s counter. The cottage Pitch and Tanton were holed up in was filled with steam from the memory tea, brewed into a thick sludge and burning on oil burners in every corner of the room. It created a haze of humid mist that hung in the small single-roomed houses like stale air, and Pitch was mildly glad for the obscurity it offered as he smacked his head into the cupboard above the sink.

He could sense Jack sitting outside on the cobblestones, his fears altogether too distracting as they slithered and stabbed and crushed each other in the spirit’s chest. Just beneath the sound of Tanton reassuring a young wolf with a cool towel and some soft words, he could hear Jack’s voice.

A part of him wanted to go outside and see whether the spirit was talking to something physical or if he was holding a conversation with whatever was in his head.

“You need a break, Pitch?”

The Nightmare King lifted his head off the cupboard and sighed, heavily. No, he didn’t need a break. What he needed was for Jack to leave the barracks so he could have half a chance to focus on the wolves without his hunger flouncing off after the spirit’s fear.

What he _needed_ was some sort of idea of how to _help_ the spirit.

He’d even _read_ , over the last few days, anything he thought might be helpful on the matter. He’d raided the bookkeeper’s stall in the Emporium – to the deep, petrified terror of the slithering owner – for something that might be of _use_. But apparently psychosis in half-cast magical spirits was a topic no author had touched upon ever, and all of the other volumes promised either imminent decay or a long, paranoid life living under a rock for any magical creature struck by a mental issue.

It wasn’t… _common_. As beings bred for immortality, Pitch supposed their minds were designed to absorb the cracks, the fragility. To reinforce vulnerabilities or at least allow a person to hide them within their own skin, to become one with them, until, if they lived long enough, they emerged from under their rock with no trace of their weaknesses and a new, insane smile.

So it became a serious problem when someone wanted to fight back against their one of their strongest inbuilt survival mechanisms: the _absorption_.

Or, even worse, when they’d never been designed with it in the first place.

_“Someone should’ve told him that dead things should stay dead.”_

Jack had been human, hadn’t he? A human given a longer life than he should have had, a life filled with more guilt than he should have been able to handle.

And Pitch would bet his left shoe that the resurrection of guilt – that of a survivor, that of a murderer – was the cause of Jack’s distress. After all, spirits of an evil nature usually devoured the guilt. They digested it, or, most of the time, used it to spur on more evil by letting it strengthen them or destroy them. Creatures of purity, of wretched kindness like the Guardians, let their guilt float nearby so everyone could give it a reassuring, accepting pat every now and then.

Which probably just made the situation worse for Jack, didn’t it? The guilt he harboured couldn’t be touched by the good guys, so he needed to swallow it like everyone else.

But he _couldn’t_. Because what the spirit wanted and what his guilt wanted _for him_ were two very opposite things.

And Pitch had been left with all of this, had _seen_ all of this, in a mere matter of days. He’d witnessed Jack keep _trying_ , and _failing_ , to touch Pitch whenever they saw each other, extending a hand only for his limbs to freeze and force Pitch to walk away before he could grab Jack in pure frustration. He’d stood by and watched as the spirit, about to laugh at something Yves had said, suddenly grab his own head and fall to the ground screaming in pain.

He’d seen fear twist every time they were forced to sit down at one of Yves’s dinners and the atmosphere got a little too easy, clench with a simple mention of Pitch or the state of the wolves, and _burn_ with even an abstract mention of the Guardians.

Jack was fighting like he’d wanted to – but he was barely making ground, and so far Pitch had done shit all to make the ground any more stable.

“I don’t need breaks, I need _solutions_ ,” Pitch muttered, and he went to get another bowl from the shelf when an explosion of fear ignited just outside the cottage door.

It was followed, a moment later, by snarling and the distinct sound of cracking ice.

The bowl followed the wet rag into the sink, and Pitch followed Tanton out of their hazy workspace only to see five werewolves holding Jack and Clyde down on the ground as they both yelled and tried to grab at each other.

“– how about it oh brave captain?”

“Stop talking shit, snowflake.”

“Don’t fucking call me that –”

By the time Skreeklavic miraculously appeared, growling loud enough to silence everyone in the vicinity, Clyde and Jack were already fighting off their restraints, overpowering and struggling out of them. Tanton looked like he was about to go slap some sense into someone, but the remorse Pitch could see welling on the spirit’s face had the Nightmare King holding an arm out to stop Tanton from interfering.

The overlord ordered everyone to get off each other, and the instant he was freed, Jack choked out an apology and bolted for it before another wolf could stop him.

And this time, Pitch knew he could no longer stand back and observe.

“On second thoughts, I’m taking that break,” Pitch threw at Tanton, his eyes on the retreating spirit as Skreeklavic began interrogating a frost-splattered Clyde.

“Wait, what –”

Without a glance back at the wolf, Pitch slinked around the squabbling group of werewolves and briskly followed the trail of distressed frost left in Jack’s wake.

_He barely lasted four days_ , he thought as he cautiously but swiftly crossed the barracks and began trudging through Yves’s woods. There were shards of ice everywhere, from icicles threatening to fall from higher branches to clumps on the ground that could easily pierce straight through leather and flesh. _How is it so severe already if it the voices have only been talking to him since Halloween?_

It wasn’t long before Pitch found the spirit – he could have done it _blindfolded_ , Jack’s fear was so potent, if not for all the damn trees he would’ve walked into. Jack was doubled over by a tree trunk, chest heaving as he spoke to himself, his voice shaking so violently Pitch thought it might fail altogether.

“Jack,” the king said lowly, and the spirit spun around instantly, falling against the tree in fright.

Pitch wasn’t even smug about the fear pouring through the spirit’s expression. He closed the distance between them – because Jack just looked so small, even _weaker_ , at the base of such a large tree – and squatted in front of the petrified spirit, keeping an intent eye on the spirit’s wide-eyed expression and his churning fears.

“I’m sorry,” he sobbed, trembling, “I’m sorry. I couldn’t stop, I couldn’t _stop_ – I don’t want this. Pitch please – NO I _WON’T_ – Pitch I can’t _think_ –”

Pitch pulled at the spirit’s hands when they began to dig into his hair and grabbed hold of Jack’s face. “Are you doing what I told you to?” he asked, voice low and stern and managing to cut through Jack’s panic for a moment.

_“Don’t give in_ ,” he’d said just the other night. “ _If you don’t agree with them, don’t give in.”_

_Fight_.

“I’m _trying_ ,” Jack whispered, and his face crumpled with a soft, pained noise.

Icy fingers touched the king’s throat, tentative and feather-light, and Pitch swallowed when Jack looked up at him and mumbled the words, “Kiss me – I’m sorry please make them – kiss me again I –”

_“You’re such an amazing kisser that the voices in my head shut right up while you have your tongue in my mouth.”_

Pitch’s brows drew together. It…it should have been fine. It should have been perfectly fine. A cold use of manipulation, calculated and deliberate. Helpful, even.

_“Will you teach me how to use my mouth, Pitch?”_

But Pitch’s hand remained firmly on the spirit’s face when he tried to move, holding Jack in place and ignoring the hurt and the frantic panic in the spirit’s eyes.

_This isn’t desire – it’s desperation. And I didn’t sign up to be used as a crutch_ , he thought as his thumb swiped over Jack’s lip and came back red with blood.

Pitch scowled. “You’re bleeding.”

Jack’s eye lowered to Pitch’s thumb, and the fingers at Pitch’s throat fell to tangle in the ties of his shirt. “The words kept coming out,” the spirit mumbled, “I couldn’t hold them…. told me… I’d bite through it if I kept on…. Can’t kiss you without a tongue…”

_His method of fighting involves a lot of blood_ , Pitch thought unhappily as Jack made another hurt sound, this one a whine that ended up choking into a sob. Ice began to grow up the tree Jack was sitting against and Pitch shook the spirit, just a little, to take hold of his attention.

“Breathe,” Pitch commanded as Jack began gasping. “Breathe and listen to me. Are you listening to me, Jack?”

The spirit’s eyes flew up to his, and he nodded, if weakly. “Good. Because the small werewolves I’m excavating the minds of all want to meet you.”

Jack tensed at the sudden news, and Pitch knew – he fucking _knew_ – the words had hit the spirit somewhere safe when a shred of the panic left Jack’s eyes. The Nightmare didn’t really know what else he could offer Jack by way of distraction – talking about anyone in the realm, himself included, seemed to do more harm than good, and he was not polite enough to start spouting anything even remotely amicable about the Guardians.

_But this spirit has a thing for snotty brats, right?_

Pitch’s fingers spread wide as Jack let the weight of his skull sit in the king’s grip, eyes gaining some lucidity as he watched Pitch talk. “Tanton has been bribing them with stories of you to keep them well behaved.”

Jack snorted softly. “Hah, the irony.”

_It also helps to distract them from the fact that they’re all delightfully terrified of me_ , Pitch mentally added. “So are you going to sit here in your misery or piece yourself back together again.”

Jack’s eyes flickered down to where his fingers were tangled in Pitch’s shirt. “I can’t see them until you’re finished, though.”

“Of course not,” Pitch said, his head tilting in toward Jack’s, “You’re their reward.”

A small, pleased flush touched the spirit’s skin, and Pitch watched for a moment as it turned a porcelain throat and cheeks a dusty shade of purple. “In just ten years, there’s so many new little wolves,” he murmured, “I want them to have fun.”

_Then fight_ , he mentally growled.

Pitch’s fingers fell away from Jack’s face, and he exhaled a small sigh when he saw Jack’s breathing begin to even out, his fears curl back in on themselves.

He touched Jack’s hand to detangle his fingers – because now that a crisis had been adverted, Pitch needed to return to the mentioned snotty brats and finish healing them – and stilled when Jack’s eyes suddenly grew very wide.

A freezing palm smacked into Pitch’s chest, rocking the king away with a low, pained exhale just as the spirit began to fill with panic, with a sloshing fear and the choking stamens of the lotus. He collapsed in a heap near Pitch’s knee and with a violent jerk, began gasping, rasping out some terribly small cry for help before he began retching onto the dry leaves.

Instinctively, the king reached for Jack – to right him, to make sure his airways were actually open – but Jack flinched away from his touch.

“No,” he choked, eyes wide as he clawed at his throat. “ _Please_.”

“Breathe,” Pitch instructed, his fingers curling into a fist as his eyes narrowed at the stamens wrapped around Jack’s throat. “Breathe for me, Jack.”

“I _can’t_.”

“You _can_ ,” he growled, and when Jack looked up at him, fear clear in his eyes, the king put as much authority in his voice as he could and uttered, “ _Breathe_.”

Jack shuddered under the command, and Pitch watched him without so much as blinking until the spirit was finally able to take an adequate gulp of air.

_This is new_ , he thought darkly as Jack leaned back against the tree, panting quietly.

The spirit glanced over at Pitch, fear still cracking the ice in his eyes until he flinched and looked away. “I need to go,” he murmured, still breathless.

A sharp sliver of anger tore through the Nightmare King, and he began to utter the spirit’s name in warning when Jack curled in on himself tighter, hands hovering barely an inch away from his head. He met the king’s gaze again, but this time with eyes filled with shards of ice floating in achingly cold water.

“I need snow,” he whispered, voice cracking. “Please let me go. Don’t make me stay here the realm’s getting too small I can’t breathe I just need –”

_Damnit_.

Sighing, Pitch got to his feet, dusting a few leaves off his trousers. He saw the spirit begin to panic, fear begin to manifest, but hushed it by uttering, “Make sure you come back.”

After a beat, the spirit nodded, looking very much relieved. This time when he pulled himself to his unsteady feet and ran, Pitch didn’t bother following after him.

A roll of tension tore through his shoulder blades, and with a furious curse, Pitch threw his fist into the wad of ice in front of him.

“Fuck,” he repeated, shaking out his hand as chunks of ice began to fall from the tree.

_I can’t even_ talk _him out of these attacks_ , he thought bitterly. _Short of tearing into his head removing all of those fears that made Jack so panicked, I honestly don’t know what the fuck to do._

The only even _remotely_ positive thing about this whole damn situation was that the last four days spent _observing_ meant that he now knew firsthand Jack’s body language whenever the voices in his head were talking to him, the approximate rate of his mental spiral, the triggers that seemed to be worse than others. _The fact that now apparently he could have panic attacks that literally left him breathless._ It was all helpful, if irritating, information, but it didn’t give Pitch any sort of answer as to how he could _get rid of_ _the voices._

Besides, of course, shipping Jack off to the Guardians and letting his head have its way.

_I need help_ , Pitch thought drearily, since his only brilliant idea of an aggressive assault would probably just make Jack’s mental issues worse. If he was going to keep his word – like the honourable bastard he’d been in a past life – he needed help, and out of all the people Pitch knew, the list of somewhat-trustworthy assholes he had to pick from was very, very short.

“Damn spirit,” he growled, and stalked out of the woods and toward Yves’s house.

Thankfully, the asshole who happened to be at the top of Pitch’s Somewhat-Trustworthy list was rifling through the cupboards of Yves’s quaint country kitchen as he nursed a basket of rolled buns to his chest. As soon as Pitch noticed as much, he let out a sigh and said, “Skreeklavic.”

The werewolf smacked his head on the roof of a cupboard so hard Pitch swore he heard the wood crack. Cursing, the wolf balefully looked over his shoulder at the Nightmare King leaning against the kitchen counter. “I won’t give you my korvapuusti,” he warned through a mouthful of bun.

Pitch rolled his eyes. “I don’t want your buns. I need to talk to you about Jack.”

Skreeklavic’s gaze sharpened, and he kept chewing as he stared Pitch down. “You know what’s wrong with him.”

It wasn’t a question, and Pitch was angry enough at his own ineptitude not to bother pretending it was one. Jack had begged him to keep quiet about this mess, but it had become disgustingly clear that Pitch wasn’t a miracle worker. He had gotten by for so long solving his own problems on his own, but this wasn’t Pitch’s own problem. It wasn’t something he knew how to solve.

The threatening taste of defeat was foul and unwelcome, and Pitch ran his teeth over his tongue to get rid of it.

“Pitch.” The Nightmare King looked back at the wolf, and saw the stern set of Skreeklavic’s eyebrows. “I have six very confused wolves out in the barracks who have no idea what’s gotten into our usually cheery little spirit, and considering the craziness everyone has experienced recently, that confusion is bordering on fear.”

_“I’m not crazy.”_

Pitch sighed. “I know. It’s not good news. Jack’s talking to something.”

Skreeklavic frowned. “Like a ghost? Or –”

“In his head. He has voices that are talking to him, and they hate us. All of us in this realm. Especially me.”

The werewolf only took a moment to process the news before an understanding, “Ahh,” left his mouth.

Pitch’s brows rose. “You don’t seem surprised.”

The werewolf scoffed. “Oh, you can colour me surprised, Pitch. But it explains a lot of things I’ve been noticing recently – and especially that scuffle with Clyde just now.”

Curiosity had the Nightmare King wandering closer to the werewolf. “What have you seen?”

Skreeklavic looked back at Pitch. “He’s been fighting with Phoenix a hell of a lot more. These past few days have been the tensest I’ve ever seen between them, and I’ve known the lads for over a hundred years. Probably explains why Phoenix has been ducking out of the realm so often.”

Pitch may have vaguely noticed the fact that he hadn’t had a fire-breathing nuisance irritate him lately, but he honestly hadn’t given it much thought. “Don’t they usually fight?”

“Not like this. Phoenix can’t get a word out without Jack snapping at him. The brat knows something’s up as well, but he’s as stressed as everyone else is right now and…” Skreeklavic shrugged, miserably, and crammed another bun into his mouth.

Feeling less than sympathetic toward the fire spirit, but gratefully cataloguing the information for later use, Pitch had opened his mouth to ask Skreeklavic for some sort of assistance in this mess when the werewolf asked cheerily, “So, what can I help with?”

_Too easy_ , his paranoia muttered, and Pitch had to tell himself rather sternly that this was _Skreeklavic_ , the werewolf overlord who had presented Pitch with his half-dead horde and trusted him not to finish them all off. Dealing with Skreeklavic wasn’t like dealing with the villains of Pitch’s past – and thank fuck for that.

And so, to hide his suspicion at the easy offer of aid, he dryly replied, “I was hoping you’d have some idea.”

“Mental illnesses aren’t exactly my forte,” the wolf admitted, “but I’ll have a subtle sus into the issue. At any rate, it isn’t exactly something we can leave alone. And I don’t know about you, Pitch, but I plan on having Jack around to play with my horde’s pups for many centuries yet. He’s also excellent company in the sweltering Carpathian summers. Indispensible, really. So he must be cured.”

Pitch wasn’t familiar enough with the mountain range to know if he was being sarcastic or not. Besides, what really worried the king was Skreeklavic’s idea of a battle plan. “You are a good commander, Skreeklavic –”

The werewolf looked touch, a sparkle returning to his eyes even if the concern hadn’t quite dissolved. “Oh shucks, Pitch. But seriously, feel free to call me your handsome neighbourhood –”

But Pitch wasn’t finished yet, and just as the wolf came in for a friendly – ugh – back-slapping assault, the Nightmare King added, “– but your idea of subtle does not fill me with much confidence.”

Eyebrows that had begun to wiggle met in sheer offence. As much as Pitch appreciated Skreeklavic’s plan – as straightforward and stalker-like as it was – Jack was terribly observant. If the spirit began _sensing_ things, then he’d have to work tirelessly to keep the malignant parts of his mind from finding out, and that cycle was just a mess that gave even _Pitch_ a headache.

“Jack notices more than anyone gives him credit for,” Pitch warned, reminding himself as well as the werewolf. “I don’t think subtle is going to be much use here.”

Skreeklavic made a nasally noise of agreement. “I suppose. Speaking of, where’d Jack run off to?”

Pitch felt his jaw tick, and he absently flexed the hand he’d thrown at the iced tree. A sharp ache twinged through the bones, but only briefly. “He said he needed snow.”

The wolf’s face settled into some knowing look, and he whacked Pitch on the back again before the king could try and dodge the attack. “Ah, you’re worried. Come on, we’ll make sure he’s safe in some cold, bear-infested tundra somewhere.”

“I’m not –” Pitch sighed when he was met with a sharp, deliberate look from the werewolf. “Fine,” he grunted. “How?”

And as quickly as the sharpness had entered Skreeklavic’s gaze, it was replaced with a wickedness that made Pitch instantly think that he was missing out on some inside joke. “We’ll ask Havið.”

Upstairs in Yves’s office, the owner of the realm was sitting at an ancient desk as he conversed with a skull Pitch had never seen before. It looked incredibly old, stained and cracked with holes in its forehead like the owner had once been trepanned. He wasn’t able to catch what the skull was saying, though, before Skreeklavic had opened the office door fully (and revealed how much of a _mess_ the place was), and Yves had slammed the skull’s jaw shut and turned to them with a suspicious look.

_He didn’t even hear us coming_ , Pitch thought with a scowl. _What exactly is he doing in here?_

“Yves, we need to borrow Havið. Gotta check to see if Jack’s okay.”

The humanised Halloween King raised an eyebrow at the werewolf’s request, and then, with that unsettling sense of intuition, settled his gaze onto Pitch.

“You allowed him to leave?”

As if he was _surprised_ about the fact. Pitch gritted his teeth and bit, “I did.”

If Pitch didn’t know better, he would have thought that there was almost an appreciative look on Yves’s face. As if the Nightmare King had exceeded his expectations like some infant who suddenly conjured the ability to walk.

Or like some monster who was showing a surprisingly human side.

_One day I’m going show this fucking king a piece of my mind._

“You made the right choice,” Yves uttered, like Pitch had to be fucking _reassured_ about his decision to send a mentally unstable spirit out into the world on his own. Yves was seriously underestimating how much of an influence thousands of years of being on his own had had on his decision making processes. Pitch didn’t need _reassurance_ , he didn’t need support, he just wanted some damn –

“Forcing him to stay would have only created more problems.”

Before an indignantly curious part of him could think to ask _why_ , a skull was presented to him. A new skull – not the one on Yves’s desk, but a different one again – and one which made Pitch feel eerily like something was watching him from every possible angle imaginable, inside and out. It was similar to the feeling he’d gotten that first afternoon he’d met Skørj, only a hundred times more potent.

Skreeklavic cleared his throat. “Pitch, this is Havið. Havið, this is Pitch Black.”

The Nightmare King stared into the two crystal eyes of the skull now sitting on his palm, at his reflection presented to him on the thousands of facets on the surfaces of the clear stones. They reminded Pitch of the eyes of a fly, only… more _knowing_. “You have more than one teleportation skull?”

Yves chuckled. “I do, but Havið is not one of them. Ask it where bony Jack is, and you will be shown.”

So the skull was…a spy?

Skreeklavic nudged his arm and gestured toward the skull. “Havið can find anyone on earth and show them to you. You don’t even have to ask for the person by name.” A loud laugh erupted from the werewolf, and he added, “The last Halloween we spent together, Phoenix nicked it from the King’s cloak and we found out that –”

But before Skreeklavic could divulge his gossip, Yves interrupted and said, “Havið, show us where our favourite frost spirit is.”

As a pearlescent light began to light up the skull’s eyes, Yves murmured, “Something is unsettled within Jack.”

Pitch hummed his agreement, caught a little by the images forming in Havið’s eyes, until he was nudged again by Skreeklavic. “Do you have any clue why?”

The Nightmare King glanced at the werewolf, and shrugged. “I think it may be guilt. His subconscious leaking into his conscious mind and using the shining examples of virtue that we are definitely not to push Jack back toward a better path.”

Skreeklavic snorted. “Better by whose standards?”

“His guilt’s,” Pitch muttered.

“You are disturbed by this.”

Pitch’s teeth ground at the sound of Yves’s observation, and he barely spared the other king the briefest glare before he tried to focus back on whatever images Havið was trying to conjure for them.

But then Skreeklavic shifted beside him in the doorway, and Pitch felt two probing werewolf eyes as he was asked, “Does a little crazy put you off the hunt, Pitch Black?”

The king jolted, and he looked at the werewolf in surprise. A fangy grin was hovering somewhere near Skreeklavic’s mouth, but so was a hint of displeasure, and Pitch found himself struck by the question.

Yves was just smirking at them from where he was leaning against his desk, and Pitch’s paranoia warned him that he was being cornered, that he was being trapped and honestly Skreeklavic was standing a little too close to be considered friendly –

The skull in Pitch’s hands suddenly cracked open, and his paranoia’s warning faded as he was presented with a bird’s eye image of a familiar frost spirit, lying curled up in the snow beside a tiny frozen stream.

_For someone so afraid of water, he spends a lot of time near it._

Pitch couldn’t see his face from this angle, but it didn’t look like he was trembling anymore. His shoulders shifted, his staff drawing closer to his chest, and Pitch couldn’t help but think, for a disgustingly sentimental second, how lonely the spirit’s back looked – a speck of blue against a vast expanse of white.

“Apparently not,” Pitch muttered to himself, and a moment later he looked up only to see the displeasure disappear from Skreeklavic’s expression.

“Then what is it?” the wolf pushed.

Pitch’s eyes travelled back down to the tiny spirit lying in the snow, and he couldn’t even bring himself to be surprised when the two scaries Jack had found came scampering through the snow to join him. Swallowing an iota of his pride and the tension he felt whenever he remembered his own weaknesses, he uttered, “I said I’d help him, but – these things – they aren’t…”

“They can leave you feeling very helpless,” Yves finished for him.

Pitch nodded, his lip curling in distaste. “I would rather gouge out my spine than actually _be_ helpless, though.”

“So we’ll do something,” Skreeklavic said, rubbing his hands together like some fiend. “I’ll let my captains know and –”

“No,” Pitch cut in. “He’ll notice, and then the voices will notice and the very idea of anyone knowing about this terrifies Jack. It won’t help.”

A breath of silence lingered between the three villains for a moment, Skreeklavic pondering on his battle plan while Yves just stood there, openly watching Pitch watch Jack. The Nightmare King could feel the gaze, it was so scrutinizing, and eventually flickered his eyes up to meet it.

_What do you want to say to me?_ he thought, and as if sensing Pitch’s aggression, Yves’s smirk sharpened tenfold.

“You’re nearly finished with the pups, right?”

Pitch tore his eyes away from Yves and nodded at the werewolf. “Yes, since we started with them.”

“Then once they’re all healed, I’ll put Jack on babysitting duty. Never in his life has he had any problem with children, and the pups are too young to be villain material in his subconscious opinion, so they should be a good distraction.”

Across the small room, Yves nodded. “And I will look into whatever remedies may help with silencing Jack’s rogue mind, and return to you with a list. Anything I find should be purchasable in your Emporium. That will leave you free to focus on the wolves.”

Before Pitch could even be offended over being _delegated_ a duty like some _underling_ , Skreeklavic’s eyebrows wriggled in their usual wicked fashion. “As well as some tender lovin’ care in your spare time.”

Pitch recoiled at the suggestion, and sent a dark look to the werewolf as he snapped Havið’s mouth shut and forced it back into Yves’s hand. “What you two are doing should be enough.”

Just as he was turning to go – because his pride _could_ _not_ _take_ any more of this – Yves called after him, “You left him to his own devices these last few days, and look what happened.”

Yves’s words slid under Pitch’s skin like a blade, and since desperate and panicked and borderline fucking _suffocating_ did _not_ fall under Pitch’s idea of enthusiastic desire, the Nightmare King spun without thinking and snarled, “I am _not_ going to touch him when he doesn’t even know what he wants.”

Yves blinked at him, not even _trying_ to hide his surprise, and Pitch felt his rage wash through him again, begging him to call on some shadows and fucking _prove_ to these idiots how serious he was. How serious it was to him that sometimes Jack’s words and his emotions were completely out of sync. How serious it was that his hunger wanted to _take_ , wanted to pull the spirit taut and wrecked and devour Jack _regardless_.

How serious it was that the spirit’s will was being _split_ , and how the fuck was he meant to test his control over the hunger, over himself, when he was left trying to pick out shards of honest ice from a bucket of broken glass.

No. He wouldn’t. If Jack wanted this _thing_ he had started, he was going to have to win the skirmishes happening in his head first. Not matter how frustrating it was. Until then, Pitch would put a lid on the hunger and wait.

He was good at waiting.

“I’m going back to work,” he muttered, and slipped out of Yves’s small office before either of the villains could piss him off even more. 

 

Once Pitch was stalking across the fields and toward the barracks, kicking at one of Yves’s pumpkin monsters that tried to lure the king into its rotting orange home with vine-like arms, somewhere on the second level of Yves’s house Skreeklavic chuckled to himself.

“See, I told you he’s a good bloke.”

Yves clucked his tongue. “I see that now.”

“So.” The werewolf languidly leaned up against the doorframe, trying for charm and charisma with a dashing of suspicion. “What were you asking Bulður?”

The werewolf received a dark look from the king, and without breaking eye contact, Yves said, “Havið, show us the Imperials in Skreek’s fortress.”

As the skull’s eyes swirled into animation, the werewolf sagged against the doorframe and pouted. “Aw, Yves, that’s not fair…”

 

* * *

 

 

The following weeks moved around and through Jack like dark, turbulent water.

Sometimes he was aware of it enough to be startled by its pace, and even more so, by the change it brought with it.

By the tireless effort the Nightmare King-turned-glorified quack doctor was exerting to flush the false memories from the wolves’ minds, and the way the horde was warming up to the grumpy, bossy physician. By the waning anxiety among the wolves every time Pitch finished with a cottage full of patients, by the shred of warm familiarity Jack felt every time the gang sat down for one of their (now regular) meals in the evenings, by the way everything seemed so… safe, and warm, within the wards of Yves’s realm.

But sometimes the sloshing and pulling, the tugging and dragging and _clawing_ , coaxed Jack toward the bottom of the rapid water, where he could feel hundreds of serrated thorns stab into the soles of his feet every time he tried to fight the pull of the current.

Every time the thoughts in his head whispered something venomous and he wasn’t strong enough to deny them, so he ended up regurgitating the poison to anyone unlucky enough to be near him. Every time he played with the werewolf pups and found himself thinking, _What if the tea doesn’t work? What if this thing that can drive a whole forest of faeries into their own deaths is smarter than Tanton, is more powerful than the alchemist’s tea?_   Every time he went looking for company only to realise everyone was busy doing something, _helping_ , that Phoenix was _avoiding_ him, and Jack was left behind like a forgotten toy.

And other times, when he looked into the dark depths long enough, he thought he could see a reflection of the night sky. It shifted, moving with the water and dragging the tiny lights it held with it, as if it was trying to escape with its treasure before anyone else could take it.

Countless times, Jack had tried to grab a light before they were all washed away. Furiously, desperately, he’d dug through the murky water for just _one_ that he could hold and protect and use against the darkness reaching up from below him.

But they had been futile attempts, tragic ones that had left him starved of air and feeling even more broken than before. He’d tried to grasp at the lights, at the soft fibres of a familiar shirt, at desire and need and a blissful moment of lust-filled clarity. But thorns prickled and malice whispered and his limbs had betrayed him, froze on him. Paralysed mere inches from his target and too scared to continue, Jack had had to watch time after time as golden eyes look into his soul with a heart-wrenching apathy that almost bordered on disappointment.

“Jack! Jack!”

“Shut up,” he muttered, digging his fingers into his hair.

Whole weeks spent in Yves’s realm highlighted just how fucking strange the Halloween King’s conception of time was. Days lasted hours longer than they did in the human world, and although Jack supposed that ethereal beings on a mission from hell to save a werewolf army really didn’t need that much structure in their sleep cycles, it had fucked with Jack’s head when Skreek had returned from one of his trips into the human world and let Jack know that Christmas had gone off without a hitch.

That Jack had _missed_ North’s biggest day of the year – one of the most stressful since that one year Pitch tried to fuck things up – because he’d been, what? Sulking in the Halloween King’s backyard because his mental health was waning?

If the quiet, good-natured comment had been meant as a wakeup call, it had certainly hit Jack all too hard.

If it had been meant as anything else… well, there was too much water sloshing against him, too many thorns in Jack’s mind to even comprehend anything else.

“Jack! Hoooowweeeooo Jaaaack!”

The grip of his fingers tightened. He was losing pieces, losing bits that he couldn’t see but he could _feel_ and it hurt to feel them go. His smiles had become so fake that the one time he’d tried to show one to Pitch, the Nightmare King had grabbed the back of his hair and warned Jack to never show him it again. But what else was he meant to do? He was useless, sitting in trees and kicking shards of ice around while everyone was working tirelessly to help the wolves, and all he could contribute to the atmosphere was a miserable presence that….

….that once lashed out and tried to hurt someone.

He hadn’t spoken to Clyde since that first week, and he was a little afraid to. He’d bitten his tongue hard enough to make it bleed so he wouldn’t say everything his mind had been spewing, but he’d still hit the werewolf with his ice and he couldn’t stand it if he gave someone else frostbite scars… if he gave someone else scars like –

“Jack Jack in the tree – the pumpkin tree tree – Jack Jack!”

_Tiny werewolves are calling you, dumbass._

“What?” With a start, Jack let go of his head and looked down at the pups milling around on the ground around his tree. He straightened up. “Oh, hey guys.”

The majority rolled their eyes at him, while one huffed and said, “We called you so many times Jack.”

_Fuck_. Climbing down out of his tree, the frost spirit grimaced sheepishly at the little girl who’d told him off. “Sorry, I was spacing. So what’s up?”

A boy in overalls held up a blue ball above his head and victoriously announced, “We found the ball!”

“Hey, good job! Where was it hiding?”

A couple of the wolves huddled in closer to Jack, as if sharing a secret with him, and the spirit squatted so they could murmur, “We found it under the sofa in Uncle Yves’s house.”

Jack couldn’t help but snort at the news. A couple of days ago, the blue ball, one of the only toys the pups had brought with them from the castle, had rolled a little too close to Yves’s back porch and no one had caught sight of it until today. Sometimes Yves could be such a killjoy.

As if reading his mind (which thank fuck these kids could _not_ ), a pup added with a reverent nod, “He’s a meanie.”

Jack grinned a little. “He is. You guys didn’t get caught?”

There was a mocking scoff amongst the little group, and the proud announcement of, “Of course not! We were spies. Spies never get caught.”

Laughing, because that’s what these kids deserved from him, Jack gestured toward Yves’s fields. “Or maybe you guys are just really good spies.”

“We are!” they all agreed as they led Jack toward a patch of dirt vacant enough for him to deck out in ice. Not very far away, Jack could see beady eyes watching them from within the little pumpkin houses scattered around the dead fields, and he poked his tongue out at the creepers.

_At this rate, you’ll wake up one morning and find them chewing on your limbs._

“Can’t get me if I never fall asleep,” Jack muttered as he tapped his staff on the soil and created a large ring of ice, large enough that the pups could play on without slipping onto the dirt, but still within the perimeter he considered far enough away from the creepy monsters watching like nosy neighbours from within their pumpkin homes.

It took less than a minute for Io and Mo to appear beside him, the former watching the kids slide around on their ice rink while Mo huddled close to Jack’s leg.

“Hey, you two wanna play too?”

“I don’t like them.”

Jack looked up in surprise and saw that three of the pups had slid over to his side of the ice, and were looking apprehensively between Jack and his scaries.

“Neither,” another added.

“What?” Jack… he didn’t know what to say. He knew Pitch didn’t think much of the scaries, but the Nightmare King hated most things. Jack supposed the two spirits were a little strange – especially Io – but they were just so little… he felt he needed to look after them. He _wanted_ to. “You don’t?”

“They don’t feel right,” the third pup whispered.

…was it some werewolf extra sense? No, surely not, because Skreek didn’t seem to have a problem with them. Maybe… it was just the intuition of young kids?

Jack looked back down at Mo, snuggled into his calf, and he couldn’t bring himself to think the pup’s gut feelings held any weight.

But the pups were serious, at least, about their discomfort. So Jack fashioned a sword out of ice, nearly as tall as himself, and attached some stiff little legs onto the blade. Predictably, Io was enraptured immediately, and when Jack sent the sword off into the woods, the scarie followed after it without hesitation. Mo, on the other hand, looked at him tearfully, as if it knew Jack had betrayed it, and the spirit swallowed guiltily.

“Sorry,” he murmured, and the little scarie mipped sadly before scrambling off after Io.

“Did I just see a sword with legs run past?”

Jack glanced up and saw a familiar wolf giving him a speculative look. The last time he’d seen Clair (aside, of course, from running into her a few weeks ago and getting slapped for never coming to visit the fortress) was when she’d been barely bigger than the pups slipping around on the ice he’d made. But now, ten years later, she’d grown and filled out into a body that was mostly feminine but with a dashing of her brother Clyde’s muscular build, along with that long blonde hair half shaved to make room for her family – cough, gang, cough – tattoo.

Honestly, barring the well-deserved slap, how much she’d changed had caught Jack off guard when they’d first seen each other again. He could remember as clear as day a young little scrawny girl with a too-big head and too-long hair, but like the humans he used to watch in the years he’d spent alone, she’d grown and changed and –

He had to swallow something thick in his throat to be able to fake an expression that resembled a smile. “Do you really wanna know?”

She snorted and, flicking her half-shaved hair over her shoulder, said, “On second thoughts, nah.”

Jack chuckled as he cast his eyes back out toward the pups on the ice. Usually, he would have been out there with them, making snow and kicking up enough of a breeze to make their game of catch just that little bit harder, but he could never quite bring himself to do it. His thoughts, mercifully, never seemed to have a problem with spending time with the pups, but he was paranoid that their opinions might change, that they might make him say something unforgivable to the kids and –

“I’ve never seen you so much in all my life, Jack,” the wolf at his side said, and Jack snapped himself out of his thoughts to look at Clair. “It felt lonely when you were gone for most of it.”

He grimaced apologetically, absently hoping he wasn’t about to get hit again. “I was trying out a change of scene.”

“And you decided to stick with this one?”

Jack huffed a sardonic sort of laugh. “Maybe I was just kidding myself when I thought I could change,” he mumbled.

_And finally, he realises it_ , the thoughts snarked.

Clair, on the other hand, punched him in the arm for the comment – with enough werewolf strength to nearly send him sprawling. “You don’t need to change. You’re our Jack – skinny and handsome and very annoying.”

Skinny and handsome and annoying didn’t do anything but hide the rot that was really inside of him. The poison. But Clair thought she was being honest, so he rubbed at the wounded limb as he peered at her. “You forgot charming,” he joked, and was rewarded when she made a face at him.

“Well…”

“Why does everyone forget how charismatic I am.”

Clair grinned at him, and before Jack could defend himself, ruffled his hair violently like every other damn wolf he came into contact with. _Why_. Why did they insist on making him look like he had just rolled out of an uncomfortable bed? And how on _earth_ had Clair gotten at least half a foot taller than him in the past ten years?!

_Because she changes and you don’t._

“I know,” he muttered.

“Don’t worry,” Clair said airily, but he didn’t miss the way her eyes sharpened just a fraction at the sound of him talking to himself. “You’re very charming, Jack. Except when you’re throwing down with my brother. Neither of you look very charming with your faces squished into the ground.”

Jack grimaced. “I – yeah, I’ve still gotta apologise for that.”

“You definitely do,” she agreed. “But seriously, having you pop in to visit the fortress were the best parts of my childhood. Of lots of ours.”

Jack had to look away from the kindness, lest she actually _saw_ something in his expression that betrayed the fact that her words cut him someone he couldn’t quite touch. Somewhere that made him feel like crying. “You say that like horde life is a bad thing.”

“It’s not bad, no way,” she argued. “But the big fortress can get dark sometimes. You always brought fun and your beautiful ice with you.”

_Fun that feels like a lie and ice that isn’t even mine_ , he thought as the rest of his mind was caught on her description of the fortress. A fortress she hadn’t been in since she’d been unconscious in a bed along with the majority of the horde.

“I’m sorry we weren’t there.”

Clair looked at him in astonishment. “It’s not like you all were out at a party or something. I understand why you guys spend Halloween at Yves. Clyde’s told me what happens when the dead come out, and I can’t even imagine what it’s like being hunted by something like that.”

Jack barely supressed a shiver at his own memories of the encounters he’d had with the dead before he’d met Yves. “Yeah.”

“I’m glad I can’t remember it, anyway,” she said, and Jack picked up a waver in her voice. He looked at her, looked at her properly, and saw the thread of pain draw her forehead together. It reminded him of the anxiety he kept seeing whenever he looked at Skreek, at Xani and Tanton and Clyde and Yanov – at any of the wolves. Everyone was still in the dark as to what the creature that’d attacked them actually was, and every time Jack _looked_ he could see that the very fact of not knowing was eating at them like some flesh-devouring parasite.

And yet, just like Jack had confessed to Pitch, the idea of _knowing_ was just as terrifying.

Clair sniffed, drawing her shoulders back as she kept her gaze on the pups out on the ice. “I’m glad I’ll never be able to remember it, thanks to Tanton and Pitch. Just the idea of hurting any of the others, or even Cyrus…”

She shuddered, and Jack wished, not for the first time, that he was more adept at human contact, at _comforting_ people. But before he could even think of something to say to take her pain – or at least try to – Clair glanced down at him, and Jack swallowed back whatever useless sentiment he was about to give the wolf.

_She’s just as strong as Clyde_ , he told himself. _She has no need for useless words._

“Anyway,” she added, “you lot wouldn’t have been much help. Everyone in the castle got affected, so you would have too. And I think we all would have actually died if you and Phoenix were there.”

Jack’s throat tightened at the very _notion_ , but then a thought occurred to him. When he’d rocked up at North’s along with the other Guardians, North and a handful of yeti and elves hadn’t been caught up in the frenzy. If the influence of the monster had swept through the Workshop – and gone deep enough to mess with the reindeer – it must have accidently missed North and those leftover workers.

Or had it left North unscathed on purpose?

_Thinking too hard doesn’t suit you. So give up._

Jack blinked in surprise at the abrupt insult, but when he tried to fight it, he felt his train of thought slip like string from his grasp. He stared down at his hands, confused and slightly terrified because what the fuck had he just been thinking about –

Trying to keep his voice even, Jack asked, “Clair, what were we just talking about?”

The werewolf looked at him in surprise, but didn’t ask questions before she replied, “I said that it was lucky you guys weren’t in the fortress that night otherwise everyone would have been screwed.”

And he felt it again, the string of his thoughts, and he grasped it tight enough to _feel_ what was wrong with Clair’s assumption – the fact that North and a few of his workers had been spared, and the fact that in the Holomire’s forest, apparently Phoenix and Jack and –

_I said stop thinking about it._

 – apparently they hadn’t been affected like the rest of the realm –

_Stop._

 – which meant…which meant what? It meant, it meant that –

_SHUT THE FUCK UP._

Jack flinched as the thoughts were yanked from his grip, burning him in the process, and he rubbed his hands together as he began to realise something – something vague, something he could barely touch, something he had to concentrate on to try and hold onto.

It took a furtive glance at Clair, who was back to watching the pups on the ice with a wistful expression, to remember, for the last time, what his thoughts were trying to take away from him.

And then he realised something terrible.

“It’s you, isn’t it?” he breathed as all these years spent shoving the thoughts of the Holomire’s forest into the back of his mind suddenly made sense. He’d never once – not one single time – questioned Phoenix when the fire spirit had said Valkryie and… and – when he’d said they were dead. He’d never asked for a reason why, for an explanation, for proof.  He’d never even questioned why there was such an immense gap in his memory – long enough for Phoenix to scrub off the Holomire’s ink, long enough for Val to get her own gravestone. He’d just accepted Phoenix’s “trust me” and never thought about it again.

He definitely trusted Phoenix with his life and so much more, but he wasn’t airheaded enough to trust him that wholly for a hundred and fifty years.

_“You’ve always trusted me, Frost.”_

He had. All this time, he had.

And _this_ was why?!

“Jack?”

_Stop bitching about every little fucking thing._

Jack choked on the retort, indignation welling powerfully in his throat. How _dare_ his own head do this to him – he wasn’t weak by any meaning of the word, he could take the memories and the thoughts and he proved as much when the cruel thoughts were missing in action in the fae realm – so they didn’t even have a useful excuse for blocking out his own –

_They’re not even YOURS!_ they roared.

Jack froze.

…What?

It took a hand on his shoulder for the spirit to jolt himself out of his internal crisis, and of all the reasons, it was because he _fell over in shock_ as soon as Clair’s fingers made contact with his hoodie.

“Jack, hey,” she said down to him, a frown etching across her face. “Are you okay?”

Jack blinked up at the werewolf standing over him, before frantically nodding his head. “Yeah,” he lied, “I’m good I – I just need to go ask Yves something.”

Before Clair could say another word, Jack was on his feet and dashing toward Yves’s house, deaf to the wolf calling after him in alarm.

The thorns in his head were growing, curling and stabbing. His mind was bleeding, panic deflating his lungs, and he burst into the house of the Halloween king with a singular purpose – he needed to leave this place. He needed to hide in some snowy wasteland until his brain numbed and his fear froze over. He needed to –

_Go to the Guardians._

“No,” he ground out, navigating his way to the stairs when he realised no one was around on the first floor. “Just snow. _Snow_.”

_You mean Boreas’s snow? The winter you hate_ so much _?_

His legs were shaking so violently that Jack tripped, fell on the stairs and grabbed at his head to try and push his thoughts back in the right direction. They were trying to ruin his only escape, they were trying to RUIN – “No, no no _stop_.”

_The winter you hate because it kills people. Because the king just sits back in his throne and watches while the helpless die alone and cold._

He was barely able to grab his staff, lying next to him on the stairs, and _crawl_ his way up the rest of the steps before the thoughts threw another low blow at him –

_Just like what happened to you._

The spirit growled at them – a growl that was so hysterical, it bordered on a muffled scream. “Stop _twisting_ it. The hatred I feel for Boreas isn’t selfish. It isn’t about _me_.”

_When is it ever not about you, you selfish prick._

The sound of water running in the bathroom became a beacon to Jack, a trickling of hope barely noticeable over the sound of the piano’s music melting through the ceiling. He hauled himself onto his wobbly legs and barely made it to the bathroom before he collapsed against the door.

“Yves!” he shouted, hoping to some sort of god that the king could hear him over the running water. “Yves please can you let me have Skørj? I won’t be long I swear I just need –”

Before Jack could even finish his request, the water was cut suddenly, and Jack had all of thirty seconds to feel awful about interrupting Yves before the bathroom door flung open. He barely caught himself on the frame before he fell into the tiled room, and had opened his mouth to apologise to the man when he got a good look at who was standing on the other side of the threshold.

And realised that it wasn’t Yves.

Shock had his panic numbing as he stared at the damp figure of the Nightmare King glaring down at him. Wet hair was combed, messily, back from his face and rivulets of water were still running down the sides of the man’s neck. For once in Jack’s life, he was witnessing the Nightmare King barefoot and wet with his sleeves rolled just up his forearms, just enough to catch a hint of the tattoos streaked across his skin.

_Fuck fuck how is he so good looking –_

His thoughts scoffed. _He looks like a freak, get your eyes checked._

Jack rolled back on his heels, touched his face to make sure his jaw wasn’t embarrassingly slack. “I thought you were Yves.”

“Clearly,” Pitch deadpanned, crossing his arms over his chest.

The smaller spirit swallowed when he saw the way the movement pulled at the muscles in Pitch’s arms, shifting tendons and flesh and images and fuck he could nearly see the outline of the guy’s abs through his shirt – “You’re wet,” he choked.

The observation was met with a judgemental quirk of the king’s eyebrow, and Jack stumbled back into the hallway, clenching his hands so his fingers wouldn’t itch to touch the man in front of him. He wanted to – god, he wanted so _badly_ to feel those fucking abs again, to feel Pitch’s fingers in his hair and the strength in his hands but –

_You know what I’ll do to you if you try._

Jack tensed, his eyes strafing off toward the staircase he’d hauled himself up. “I mean, uh, long time no see, right?”

The Nightmare King rolled eyes barely flecked with gold and dryly said, “I know you watch me training in the barracks in the mornings. You’re not very subtle.”

When Jack glanced back at the man, he saw that Pitch was smirking at him oh so slightly. Miffed, the spirit puffed out his cheeks. “Maybe I just like enjoying my sunrises with a healthy dose of watching you get your ass kicked by a werewolf.”

A predatory grin curled the corner of the Nightmare King’s mouth. “There hasn’t been a lot of that lately, has there?”

The spirit nearly died at the sight of the smile, and sheer force of will alone prevented any shred of the cold it conjured from curling anywhere near where it shouldn’t. No, there hadn’t been a lot of watching Pitch get his ass kicked lately. In fact, the ass-kicking had only lasted a week, tops, and now whenever Jack settled back against one of the cottage chimneys to watch the strange sparring-slash-grunting sesh Pitch usually had with Yanov after the two had finished a run – nothing about their morning routine was okay, in Jack’s opinion – the spirit was always watching in awe as Pitch _destroyed_ Yanov.

Jack didn’t even know where the guy got it from – the muscles, the skills to be able to deck one of Skreek’s best fighters, the _energy_ to do it all on top of exhausting himself every day by helping the wolves.

It made Jack want to know why. Had Pitch always had this sort of routine in his life? Did he used to go jogging through his creepy little forest on his own, once upon a time? Was he sporting some kind of home gym in his lair and _that’s_ how he got so ripped?

Just the thought of Pitch running on a treadmill as he flicked through the pages of a western romance novel had the spirit smiling, slightly. He glanced up at the king and felt the cold in his gut swim a little lower when he noticed that a stray piece of hair had fallen in the man’s face.

He wanted to touch it. To touch _him_. But Jack supposed that he also wanted the king to do his “training” in a state as shirtless as Yanov, and as things were now, he couldn’t exactly _have_ everything he wanted.

So, trying for a casualness his libido was definitely _not_ feeling, Jack said, “You can’t lecture me about being subtle when the only reason you jog around Yves’s property is to sus the place out every morning.”

Pitch’s stare was getting darker, the gold fading and the silver rising as he kept his eyes locked intently on the spirit in front of him. “Obviously I run with my eyes closed so as to respect the privacy of our gracious host.”

Jack had just started to smirk at the sarcasm when his thoughts chimed in with a rude, _Run with your eyes shut straight into the lake and drown, prick._

The spirit struggled not to react to the thought – but the very idea of that happening to Pitch had a worming sense of anxiety growing within him. The gold in Pitch’s eyes relit, and he glanced down at Jack’s chest in mild surprise.

Jack curled his body away from the king, hoping the movement would block whatever Pitch could sense with his Nightmare King powers. “Do you think I should come with you sometimes?” he asked, voice quiet, almost a mumble. “I mean, it might help.”

Pitch’s eyes narrowed fractionally. “I suppose your inability to shift even lightweight objects would improve with some physical exercise.”

Jack had a gut feeling that the joke was a façade, but still the spirit pouted. He had to keep up appearances, after all. Especially in front of himself. “Hey! I have muscle. I just don’t have some Olympic swimmer body like you, you freak.”

He flinched when he realised how harsh his retort sounded, how brittle the edges of his words were. Clearing his throat, he asked, in a softer tone, “Is it fun?”

“It’s distracting,” the king replied, eyes fixed on him. “So join us if you wish.” Then gold and silver floated down to Jack’s bare feet and he added, mildly, “Although you’ll need shoes.”

_Shoes_? “Ugh… yeah, I might take a pass on the military drills, then.”

Pitch stiffened, and Jack immediately took a step back from the man, afraid he might have offended him somehow. The small, jerky movement seemed to snap Pitch out of whatever moment he was having, though, and at the raised brows Jack received, the spirit realised with a burning sense of embarrassment what he had just done.

“I –,” he began, but he didn’t even know what he wanted to say, so his mouth just floundered for a second, for two seconds.

_Ah, what a useless conversation. Leave already._

His eyes had just begun to track their way back to the stairs when Pitch heaved a sigh that sounded so weary it made Jack’s windpipe close.

The king’s shoulder bumped into the doorframe, and he said in a low tone, “I am patient, Jack. I’m good at waiting. But I will get bored if you take too long.”

The breath hitched in Jack’s tightening airway, and he felt something akin to that dark, aching hollow feeling return to his gut.

_Oh look, did you hear that? He’s bored of you._

Jack swallowed back the urge to correct the thoughts, to try and convince himself as much as them that they were wrong, but he _couldn’t_ , so with the eyes of a coward plastered to the floor, Jack mumbled, “Why do I have to be the one? You could literally swoop in any time you want and –”

“You know why.”

The hard edge in Pitch’s voice had Jack flinching. His eyes rose to the king, to the razor sharpness of his features, to the intensity in his eyes. He would slice himself open if he so much as _touched_ them, if he could just….

“I want to,” he breathed, feeling his thoughts stir unhappily in his head. “I always want to.”

Pitch took a step out of the bathroom doorway, a threatening step toward Jack, and the spirit instinctively backed up. “What to _what_?” he pushed, and the spirit tried to swallow around the shards of broken silver and gold lodged in his throat.

His back hit the hallway wall and Jack turned his face away when Pitch towered over him. “You’re being an asshole,” he gritted out, because _damnit_ the king _knew_ –

_No. Don’t go there_ , he reminded himself, clamping down on the thoughts.

Rough fingers dug into his jaw and Jack’s face was jerked upwards so he could feel the full assault of Pitch’s stare. “Am I?” the king challenged, and Jack’s hand clenched around his staff.

“I want _you_ ,” he snapped, tearing his face out of Pitch’s grip. “You _know_ that, you know –”

“You’ve said that to me before and you didn’t mean it,” the king snarled.

Jack’s eyes grew wide. “I apologised for that!”

The king scoffed. “You never gave me a reason _why_. I am usually quite good at figuring people out, Jack, and I am getting better at figuring _you_ out – but there are some things that grate on my nerves, and not knowing why you said that is one of them.”

_What does it even matter? Nosy bastard._

The old wood in his staff splintered into Jack’s hand as he bit out, “It doesn’t matter.”

Pitch’s eyes narrowed. “I beg to differ.”

“It _doesn’t_ ,” Jack argued, “I won’t do it again, I will never say something like that to you again.”

“I know you won’t,” Pitch replied, assured and cold and _ugh_ sometimes Jack wished he could just grab that confident expression _and_ – “I still want to know why you have that fear.”

Determination and disobedience had Jack snapping, “Can’t you just see for yourself?”

He was still a little unsure whether Pitch’s sixth sense actually involved literal sight or some strange third-eye kind of chakra vision, but whatever he utilised to witness fear would be better than Jack having to articulate what the king wanted to know. What Jack really did _not_ want the king to know.

He flinched again when Pitch grunted angrily at him. “I cannot just _see_ for myself because you do not _deal_ with your problems.” The king poked him forcefully in the chest. “You’ve corrupted some of your fears so thoroughly that I can’t read them properly. I doubt even you know the extent of what you’re afraid of.”

_What a nice way of saying he’s become a weak piece of shit._

_What a nice way of saying that I’m a garbage dump_ , Jack thought with a growing glare, smothering the other, mocking thoughts with a twinge of his own indignant anger.

“I won’t,” Jack bit, defiant as all hell, and Pitch’s expression grew dark with an emotion that was far from nice.

“You will if you want me to touch you again.”

Jack laughed a little at the king’s reply. “At this rate, I’m going to get sick of this blackmail and you’re going to die of boredom.”

A brow quirked – angry, offended, and amused all at once. “You underestimate me if you think this is my idea of blackmail.” A shiver stole through Jack’s spine when he heard the rough edge of Pitch’s anger in his voice, the grating sound of a threatening promise yet to be made. The king smirked when he noticed, and swooped back in so he could smack an open hand into the wall by Jack’s head.

“Let me put it to you this way,” Pitch purred, the dark, menacing aura that Jack _hated_ returning with a vengeance. “When you get around to touching me of your own volition, and I finally get to have my way with you, what happens when you are out of your mind with lust and I happen to encounter the things you’re terrified of. _Who do you think I am_?”

Jack's heart stuttered, while the rest of him was stunned for a long second.

_He’s a sorry bastard who’s a liar, a cheater. You think he’s a manipulating coward who’d –_

“Pitch,” the spirit croaked. “You’re… _Pitch_.”

“The king of _fear_ ,” the man corrected. “Do you honestly think I’d be able to – or I would even _want_ to – say no to the terror rolling off a little thing like you when you’re beneath me?”

Before Jack could even choke out a reply – a fervent _yes_ , because even if Pitch went back on his word and tried something Jack wasn’t up for, the spirit was more than happy to break the guy in half with some well-placed ice – Pitch was pulling back, drawing away with his slicked back hair and saying, scathingly, “Did you even _think_ that far ahead? Or was this just a convenience for you.”

Jack’s confused heart stopped, jerking into some lifeless state as the accusation bit straight into his ribcage. Fuck, he’d thought this shit was over. He’d thought screaming at the guy in Kitrashin, their talk on the rooftops in the fae realm, was meant to make this shit _stop_.

_He will never stop, Jack. Because this is who he is. Just a snivelling asshole who –_

“You think this is convenient?” Jack snapped, primarily to block out the sound of his thoughts’ tirade. But the voice that flowed through his lips was cold, so cold that Pitch’s gaze sharpened in the way it usually did when he sensed something amiss. Pity, then, that nothing was amiss except Jack’s exceptionally offended heart. “Hammering a hole in my head would be _convenient_. This? This hurts too fucking much to be convenient. It helps – it’s always _helped_ – but it also makes everything so much _worse_ and the fact that you won’t kiss me again screws with my head but I can’t do anything about it.”

He heaved a breath, a rattled gasp, and Pitch uttered lowly, “You can.”

“What?” Jack gaped. But the Nightmare King was turning from him again, a- _fucking_ -gain, because apparently collecting his socks and shoes from the bathroom was more important than setting straight whatever issue the two of them were having. “ _What_ can I do, Pitch?”

The man didn’t offer him an answer, and Jack had to watch, mind turning revoltingly, as Pitch pulled on his socks and checked his damn hair in the mirror.

In hindsight, he probably should’ve taken the out Pitch was most definitely offering him. He should have strolled back out of the house and found something to distract himself, to do anything to himself so he wouldn’t just _stand_ there in Yves’s hallway and cry, “ _What_. What do you _want_?”

The king stared at Jack for a long moment – a moment so long that Jack’s lungs began to burn. He didn’t look like he was about to lash out at the spirit, though. In fact, a calmness had re-entered Pitch’s expression and Jack didn’t know – he didn’t _know_ – whether he should be relieved or utterly terrified by it.

Boots were yanked onto muscular legs, and without doing the laces, Pitch moved back into Jack’s vicinity. Back into his space, his air, his _everything_ , and the spirit gasped when the king’s nose brushed against his.

_So close he’s so close oh god –_

“A better question is _what will I do_.”

His breath dusted across Jack’s mouth, as he waited, a heartbeat, and then another, until, with a tremor in his voice, Jack opened his mouth and echoed the question back at the king.

Pitch’s nose touched the side of the spirit’s cheek, a deceptively tender gesture that had Jack’s knees growing weak. His mouth brushed against the shell of Jack’s ear and he murmured, “Give me what I asked for and I will kiss you until you’re a panting, moaning, _wreck_.” Cold bled through Jack’s skin, his cheeks and his neck and he shuddered as the king’s soft, dark words curled through his ears and straight between his legs.

And then Pitch moved in _closer_ , so close that there was only the thinnest breath of air left between them and Jack’s eyes were full of black, full of darkness, and he could feel the king so close, so desperately close if only he could _move_ … “I will touch you until you’re begging, mark up your throat until it’s covered in bruises and you can do nothing but rut like an animal in heat.”

Fuck _fuck –_

Jack felt Pitch’s mouth against his jaw and he inhaled a tiny, broken breath. “I will bring you to the edge of your sanity and remind you that this is what you asked for.” Fingers barley brushed the side of Jack’s throat and he nearly moaned at the contact, at the need for even the slightest shred of stimulation. “Pleasure laced with a touch of fear. A pleasure only I can offer.”

His head was filled with images and the _scent_ , clean and dark and heady, of the man in front of him. Of the skin right before his eyes, barely dried and dipping beneath Pitch’s shirt. The thoughts – his _thoughts_ – were pulling their figurative hair out under the onslaught. His heart was picking up and his limbs twitched with the need to just turn and meet the man’s mouth and let him have his way. Let him have _everything_.

But for every thump of Jack’s heart, every desperate shudder that cascaded through his bones, his lungs were starting to get nervous, tense. As pathetic as it made him, there was a fine line between not nearly enough and too much when it came to this shit, between desire and terror, and he could feel his mouth go dry with a mixture of both.

He could feel Pitch, like the bastard he was, winding up for his punch line.

Then the king languidly added, with a scrape of teeth against Jack’s jaw, “I will lay you out on one of these beds and fuck you until you can’t remember anything but my name.”

The anxiety won out with that final remark, and Jack felt his lungs seize and his throat close tightly. It barely took a moment for Pitch to pull back, undoubtedly _expecting_ the reaction, and peer down into Jack’s chest with eyes blistered with gold and a pensive, dark look on his face.

“You will tell me why that’s there,” he murmured, and Jack traced his fingers over his own throat, trying to free his breath. Pitch’s eyes rose, tracking the movement, and his mouth returned to Jack’s ear so he could add, in a low growl, “But first, you will _win_.”

And this time, when Pitch finally backed out of Jack’s space for good, the spirit legs gave out and he fell on his ass on the hallway floor.

_Fuck_ , he thought and he tried to convince his lower half that Pitch had just been doing this to prove a point – a seriously shitty point – but a point nonetheless. _Maybe I should try that running thing if my legs are gonna be this useless._

_Or you can just stay down on the ground like the pile of shit you are._

Yeah, a pile of shit with half an erection that was sitting so fucking uncomfortably in his pants that Jack adjusted himself – not even bothering to be embarrassed because screw Pitch and his _fucking_ –

When he glanced up, it was to catch a predatory display of hunger ripple through Pitch’s expression. Groaning, Jack knocked his head back against the wall and muttered, “You’re such a sadist.”

A smirk. “You sound like you’re surprised.”

The spirit narrowed his eyes at the fucker. “I don’t get why you have some sort of choke hold on your libido as well as your emotions.”

A muscle in Pitch’s jaw ticked, but the smirk still managed to stay in perfect position. “Maybe I just like watching you squirm.”

_Liar_ , he whispered to himself as he rocked forward and said, “Then I bet you’d like it better if I was in your lap.”

In an instant, Pitch expression turned terrifyingly cold, and before Jack knew what was happening, the king was on his knees in front of him and Jack’s head hit the wall behind him as long fingers curled around his throat.

And the spirit couldn’t even find it in him to regret opening his mouth because the _warmth_ of Pitch’s hand around his throat brought a desperate whine to the spirit’s lips. He clawed at the wrist, nails biting into Pitch’s skin just to _feel_ the man properly for the first time in weeks.

Pitch’s eyes flickered between his own hand and Jack’s slipping grip, a hell of a lot more heat in his eyes than there had been when they’d pulled a similar stunt in Kitrashin. But in the back of his mind, Jack could feel his thoughts begin to fester horribly. He could feel them being to articulate venom, to construct acid, and Jack knew that this was all partially his fault for being weak, but it was also theirs – because Jack had made progress, fucking _progress_ , with Pitch and then they just had to make this whole thing _harder_.

It was just so fucking _frustrating_.

Especially when he tried to defy them.

_What did I say about touching him?_

The thought was calm, chiding, almost, like how a grown up would talk to a disobedient infant.

_We don’t like it, Jack._

_Don’t say we_ , he bit back. He hated when they did that, when they tied Jack and the poison together until he could feel it seep through his skin, crawl like ants beneath the surface and worm its way into his bones.

_He’ll hurt you Jack. You can stand pain but you still need oxygen, and it’s no fun getting fucked with none of that is it?_

Their barbs were digging deeper, more precise, and Jack pushed a painful breath out of his lungs. He needed Pitch to let go of him, he needed to stop touching the king, oh god he needed –

But Pitch… Pitch wasn’t reacting to any of Jack’s welling stress. He’d gone from brutally concentrating on the spirit to staring off at the wall to Jack’s right, scowling as if he could see through it as his thumb absently brushed over Jack’s skin.

But couldn’t he _sense_ Jack’s fear? Couldn’t he –

_Newsflash, he just doesn’t care._

In a moment of panic, Jack’s grip tightened on Pitch’s wrist and he accidently let loose a burst of cold that had the king’s hand jerking back from him with a jolt. Jack fell sideways onto the hallway floor, gasping even though Pitch’s hold hadn’t even _begun_ to carve into his windpipe, but still he was left breathless, starving for air so violently that his shoulders rolled and he retched on the floor. There was no gold involved but there was pain, burning suffocation and the bitterness that always surged whenever his head did this to him.

The king moved beside him, and Jack dug his fingers into his hair as he watched Pitch do a miraculously swift job of lacing up his boots.

“Look at me,” Pitch uttered.

Jack glanced up and saw the king search his face, his chest – scanning, checking, wordlessly assessing to make sure Jack wasn’t going to be an inconvenience and actually die on the floor right in front of him.

The search lasted barely a few seconds before he rocked back onto his heels and stood. “You said you were here for Yves.”

“I guess,” the spirit rasped, coughing, one last time, to clear the rest of his airways.

“Find him.”

Jack shot into an upright position. “What? Where are you going?”

“The barracks,” Pitch said evenly, but the swiftness of his stride as he headed toward the stairs betrayed his calm exterior. Or, at least, Jack _assumed_ it did. And his assumption was proven entirely correct when the Nightmare King tried to fucking _teleport_ – something he hadn’t been able to do for _weeks_ now – and ended up stumbling into a wall and clutching at his chest.

Jack scrambled to his feet and barely made it to the king before Pitch was moving again, stalking at a ferocious pace that Jack had to literally run to keep up with. “Shit, Pitch – what’s happening?”

“I don’t know,” Pitch muttered, pain leaking into his voice, and Jack could barely stop his fear from welling as they hurried toward the wolves.

The moment Jack’s feet touched cobblestones, he heard the growling. Pitch moved on ahead of him, undeterred by the sheer number of wolves looking so _frantic_ as they milled about a particular set of cottages further within the barracks. He spied Clair sitting on a windowsill, her little brother tucked in close to her chest as she tried to soothe the child.

Jack swallowed at the sight of them, and skipped to catch up with Pitch. Hex and a few familiar faces were trying to placate a group of wolves gathered near a cottage which Jack assumed was the focal point of all that horrible noise. The she-wolf barely even noticed Jack as he darted past the group, and out of the corner of his eye, he thought he could see two little streaks of white hurrying along the footpath.

But then the din happening in the cottage ahead of him grew louder, and Jack’s mind zeroed in on the way the growling was splitting, diverging. This close, he could discern the shouting and crying, the terrible way everyone sounded so panicked as Skreek’s captains tried to instigate order.

Pitch hand fell from his chest and he disappeared into the noise, into the pain, and Jack froze at the threshold of the cottage.

“Hold them down!” Xani commanded.

“Yanov!” another, familiar, wolf screamed. “I have to get to Yanov. Let me go I have to –”

“Olivia,” Yanov replied, and Jack could see the barest outline of the wolf try to touch his flailing wife. “I’m here it’s me I’m –”

“GET OFF ME WHERE IS MY YANOV GET –”

A dark, disgusting swathing of dread spread through Jack’s stomach as he watched Yanov and Xani struggling to hold a screaming, _tearing_ Olivia down onto the bed. The she-wolf Jack had always remembered as the socialite other half of Yanov was clawing at anyone she caught in her sightless eyes, howling and thrashing and Yanov just looked so lost as he tried to reason with her, tried to get her to recognise him.

The other four wolves in the cottage were just as fevered – between Xani, Yanov, Tanton, and Pitch, they were all struggling to hold down anyone and everyone and doing a horrifyingly terrible job of it.

The dread in Jack’s gut was practically sentient, moving with such purpose that Jack couldn’t barely move his own limbs in fear that it would fight against him, that it would try to impose another will on him that wasn’t his own. It was the same sickening sludge that had groped through his innards in North’s Workshop, when he’d been surrounded by the carnage of the –

_There’s no point watching this like some numbskull gawking at a train wreck._

For the first time, Jack thought he heard a waver in the thoughts’ snark, a tremor beneath those bit out words.

_“Open your eyes, Frost. You can’t hide from this.”_

“Does this scare you?” he asked as he watched Pitch help Tanton tie the limbs of the thrashing wolves to whatever they could find.

_Go fucking die_ , the thoughts snarled as Jack heard the distinct and sickening sound of bones popping

All the captains present went considerably paler than they already had been. “They’re shifting?” Tanton balked. A wolf strapped down behind him snapped the bones in his leg in half with a great howl and Tanton had to leap out of the way of the flailing limb before he got stabbed.

Even Pitch was beginning to look repulsed by the aggressiveness of what was happening around him, and somewhere, niggling at the very tip of Jack’s spine, he found that revulsion curious.

Amusing, almost.

_What the_ fuck _are you talking about?_

Jack blinked and realised, with a jolt, exactly what he had been thinking. He shook his head quickly to get the strange thought out of his head and turned, away from the wolves contorting and breaking themselves and the others staring in horror as they did so. “Nothing, nothing it was nothing –”

“Pitch, can you put them to sleep?” Xani asked.

Jack heard the tightness in the king’s voice as he answered, “It will be a sleep riddled with nightmares – if they’re like this already –”

“It’s either that or they kill themselves trying to shift. And we can’t knock them out because their bones are already –”

“ _Pitch_ …” Tanton’s voice, loud and very clearly alarmed, had Jack flinching, and the spirit looked over his shoulder just in time to catch wafts of nightmare-inducing darkness pour off the king in the middle of the room.

Yanov, who’d been yanked away from Olivia’s bedside, noticed Jack in the doorway and barked, “Where the hell is Phoenix?”

Jack’s heart made a lurching motion, a frightened one, and he began shaking his head frantically. “I – I don’t –”

As Pitch’s shadows began to do their job, and the noise of the wolves faded into a murmur of fitful sleep, Tanton seemed to notice which direction Yanov was stomping in and grabbed the werewolf around his broad shoulders before he could meet Jack at the doorway.

As he wrestled the werewolf back in toward the sleeping wolves, Tanton said, “Jack, go and get the boss.”

The darkness inside the room was thick – Jack could barely make out the figures of Xani, Yanov, and Pitch anymore – and even though this most definitely was not the time, a trickling of anxiety began to pool in Jack’s stomach. After all, Pitch hadn’t had a chance to gain any semblance of strength since their trip to the fae realm, and asking him to do this….

But Jack swallowed the concern – he had to, because he was only going to get yelled at by the wolves and by Pitch and he didn’t think the sludge squirming thickly in his gut could handle that sort of stress.

“Where is he?” the spirit asked instead.

The wolf’s nerves were so wrecked that even the simple question had him losing a shard of his composure. “Find a skull and _ask_!” he snapped, before turning and merging back into the darkness with his kin.

Fingers tightening their grip on his staff, the spirit turned, more than moderately terrified of the fact that he literally had no idea where the hell Yves was. A wisp of white caught his eye, and Jack made the mistake of looking down.

Io stood there, black bottomless eyes swirling, almost, in their absolute depths, and Jack couldn’t move, couldn’t work a synapse in his brain to tell his eyes to lift away from the dead stare of the scarie. Mo was trembling at Io’s back, but Jack couldn’t even ask _why_ it was hiding because in the next moment, a dim, distant spark lit in Io’s eyes and Jack was swept into a blinding light.

And in the next, an infernal, organic pain tore through Jack’s shoulder.

He gasped in surprise as he felt and heard his collarbone fracture with a gruesome crunch. He lifted his hand to his skin in shock and felt cool wetness there, a dampness that was seeping and dribbling. When he pulled his hand away from his shoulder he stared in surprise at the sight of bright blood covering his fingers.

The pain was diminishing, hiding itself away behind the barricades Jack had long built to protect himself from the skin-peeling, sickening quality bodily agony always had, and the spirit looked back at Io as blood dripped from his fingers.

The scarie’s eyes were still pits of darkness with flaming cores, and as blood trickled and dripped Jack heard the garbled, wet sound of a child’s scream pierce his eardrums.

He groaned and smacked his head into the doorframe, eyes never leaving Io as his heartbeat hiked and adrenaline and panic filled his veins. His fingers curled over air, over air, over material and flesh and small thrashing limbs, and then air again.

And then the sound and the muffled pain abruptly disappeared. Jack’s fingers fell limp, and he blinked in time to see Io fall back on its ass on top of Mo as their connection was severed.

The spirit noticed a wisp of shadow unwind from Io’s leg and disperse a moment before strong fingers caught Jack by the chin and yanked him around to meet the Nightmare King’s gold eyes.

Jack’s heart clenched, almost too painfully, when he saw the scratches leaking shadows across the king’s jaw. When he saw way the hand that wasn’t holding Jack was holding his chest, as if he could just tear out whatever was causing him so much pain.

“Go and get Skreeklavic,” Pitch uttered, low and clear and stern, but without the panicked authority the wolves had been trying to command him with. “Can you do that?”

_You’re hurt_ , he wanted to say. _You’re hurt and you look so drained._

…but then what? Tell the Nightmare King to stop helping the wolves and fulfil his own fear of becoming a piece of selfish trash?

Jack swallowed. “I don’t know where Yves is. His skulls, I can’t just –”

“Try his office. I usually find him in there.”

The spirit inhaled a shuddering breath. “Yeah, okay.”

Pitch let go of him then, and casting one last glare at where the scaries had been – an empty space, Jack now noticed – he stalked back inside the cottage. Jack glanced down at his own fingers, and heaved a small breath when he confirmed that the blood was gone.

 

Unlike the rest of the house, Yves rarely committed himself to polishing his office space. Old (dust-free, of course, but still rotting) books were strewn across the floor in large piles, candles covered in melted wax leaked off the walls, and there was a ditch in the middle of the room that had always reminded Jack suspiciously of a fire pit. The presence of the pumpkin plant was also ridiculously dominant, so much so that Yves had long taken to hanging pens and skulls off the vines just to give it some use.

It was a space that always reminded Jack of the Halloween King himself, not of the fastidious human-like terror sheltering his form for most of the year.

The aforementioned terror seemed to be making some sort of shopping list when Jack barged into his office. Without even needing to be prompted, Yves reached over into a bowl of fruit he had on his desk and procured the gaudiest looking skull in his collection.

“You’re kidding me right?” Jack muttered as he stared at the bedazzled appearance of Yvorik. The stupid skull even wore a wig, for fuck’s sake – a honey blond little number with tight curls and jewels woven into the tresses.

Yves glanced once at Yvorik, then over his shoulder at Jack. “Yvorik is your only option, bony Jack.”

Well, that must have meant that Skreek was wielding Skørj, right?

Taking the promise of a quiet return as his silver lining, Jack hopped around the broken floor and tentatively took hold of the skull. He held the thing as far away from him as bodily possible as he said, “Yvorik, take me to Skreek.”

He squeezed his eyes shut immediately, and when nothing seemed to happen, no ground tilting, no break out into epic song, Jack cracked an eye open to see Yves silently cackling to himself as Yvorik pouted.

Actually _pouted_.

“You’re a piece of bone, how are you making facial expressions?”

“You will have to use your polite, indoor language, bony Jack,” Yves informed him.

“Oh for fu- ugh, _please_ , Yvorik. _Please_ take me to Skreek –”

“AAAhahaha,” the skull suddenly boomed, a voice layered several times over filling the house with the most obnoxious laugh Jack had ever known. Even the piano upstairs fumbled on a note as Yvorik’s voice penetrated, like a bad smell, everything in its reach. “LET me tell yoooou YOUNG ONE of a journey EMBRACED by two of the LOVELIEST –”

“Fuck,” Jack muttered as the skull vomited waves of ostentatiously emerald smoke without even taking a pause from speaking, and the spirit was dragged into a deafening, green hell.

The journey wasn’t even the worst part. No, because that would have required some shard of luck to be on Jack’s side, and honestly, luck had fucked off a very long time ago.

The worst part was when Yvorik’s smoke had cleared – but not his serenading voice, unfortunately – Jack was left staring in bleak horror at a very, very familiar sight.

“Are you sure he’s here?” he croaked.

But before Yvorik could provide him with a dramatic monologue of an answer, Jack spotted a milling of wolves by the building’s entrance, and his mood sank even further into the depths of despair. “Oh, never mind,” he muttered as he slid down the snowy slopes toward North’s Workshop.

 


	22. A Tale of Two Skulls

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Pitch whisks himself off to the Emporium for some grocery shopping, and Jack has to deal with shards of his two worlds colliding.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Part 2 of the update

“Gloomy Pitch, here is the list.”

Pitch straightened up, rolling out his shoulders one last time as Yves approached where he was loitering outside a nightmare-filled cottage with Tanton. The wolves might have been sleeping (restlessly, but still quietly) for the time being, but that didn’t allow an iota of the tenseness to leave the king’s muscles. Whatever had just happened hadn’t been right, it hadn’t been _expected_. Tanton had hypothesised that the monster’s grand finale would be to unlock the false memories and create an actual frenzy, but that was meant to happen to _everyone_. Not just to five wolves in a single cottage, who were all quite simply knocked out by a waft of nightmare darkness.

It didn’t make sense, and Tanton chain-smoking near Pitch’s shoulder screamed as much. It didn’t help, either, that the nightmares swarming through the wolves’ minds were beckoning Pitch to _feed off them_. It took everything Pitch had to remain _outside_ the damn cottage and not do anything to incite one of the wolves – namely Yanov – into murdering him.

_I_ need _fear, though_ , Pitch, along with his hunger, mentally growled. The use of his power had spread the perpetual dull ache from his chest into his bones, and he had to flex his fingers, just once, to make sure they moved properly before he reached for Yves’s list.

Yves watched him for a moment, another one of those appraising looks on his face that Pitch so loathed _._ Irked, the king snatched the paper out of Yves’s bony grasp and his eyes scanned the significantly bulky list. “And I can find all of this in the Emporium?”

“If your herbalists are worth their weight in seeds, then most probably.”

Narrowly supressing the urge to correct Yves’s use of the possessive case – because it honestly wasn’t worth the wasted breath – Pitch nodded and jammed the paper into the pocket of his pants.

Then a skull was offered to the king, and Pitch stared down at the fanged face of Skørj for a confused moment. “Shouldn’t Jack have that?”

Yves’ mouth didn’t move, but Pitch could sense a smirk lurking somewhere near his eyes. “Bony Jack needs to learn not to rely on my hospitality so often.”

_Charming_ , Pitch mentally muttered as he absently let Yves drop Skørj into his open hand.

“Skreeklavic –”

“Is at the North Pole.” Pitch tensed, and glanced over his shoulder at Tanton only to see the wolf shrug helplessly. Yves tilted his head, amused. “Does that answer your question?”

No, no it didn’t answer his damn question. And by the way Yves’s eyes were positively _laughing_ at him, Pitch knew that the other king had little care for whatever the Nightmare King really wanted to ask. He bit down on his tongue to keep from saying anything else – to keep from growling at the ridiculous irritation that was contracting the muscles beneath his skin – and levelled a dark look at Yves.

With that smirk finally worming its way onto the guy’s mouth, Yves nodded toward Skørj. “For future reference, the skulls consider this realm their home.” Yves turned to walk away, presumably back into his dank little office, and threw a mild, “Call this place anything else and they will burrow into your face for being an imposter,” as he went.

Pitch flickered a cautious look down at the skull in his hand, his eyes narrowing when he saw the way Skørj’s jaw was moving, its teeth separating then clamping together ever so slightly, as if it was twitching for a good meal.

“And people call me creepy,” Pitch muttered to himself.

In the next moment, though, Pitch realised exactly _what_ he was holding in his hand and his head snapped up to the retreating image of the Halloween King in horror.

_I never even_ asked _for this skull –_ how _did that king know –_

“Where are you going?”

Shoving a cork into his anger – because, really, Pitch actually _did_ need a skull to get out of this damn realm, although he’d be damned before he admitted it aloud – his eyes slid to the wolf standing at his side, a cigarette between his teeth as he looked between Skørj and the Nightmare King. “Shopping,” Pitch said flatly, and Tanton raised his eyebrows.

“How long will it take your nightmare goo to wear off?”

_It is not “goo_ ”, he mentally growled. “Not long.” He glanced into the shadow-filled cottage. “But they should wake in a normal state, shouldn’t they?”

“Theoretically,” Tanton muttered, eyes flickering to the leaking scratches Pitch could feel stinging across his jaw. “If they don’t, we’ll be able to handle them better when the boss and Clyde get back anyway. Ugh, I yelled at Jack didn’t I? Fuck I didn’t mean to.” The wolf scrubbed a hand over his face as he took another long drag of his smoke and asked a garbled, “How are you feeling?”

Pitch stilled. “What?”

Tanton exhaled a smoke-filled breath and used the hand holding his cigarette to point to Pitch’s barely-dried mop. “Your head. We spend most of our time in amongst all the tea steam, you haven’t started having short term memory loss or anything have you? Do you still remember where you put your glasses old man?”

Pitch rolled his eyes at the last little attempt at a joke, because, as a gracious king, he was generous enough not to bother highlighting that Tanton’s humour was rather pathetic when he was still rattling with anxiety. “The tea is made of earthly ingredients. I doubt it’d have the same effect on someone like me.”

He expected some sort of thoughtful agreement on the matter – an offensive comment, even, that further outlined the great expansive divide that separated earthly and otherworldly magic – but Tanton simply snorted. “Hah, nah there’s immunity for the tea, but that’s not how you get it.”

The king whirled on the wolf. “What? Do any of the wolves –”

“No, no way.” Then, _finally_ , Pitch received his thoughtful pause. Followed by a knowing smirk. “Jack’s immune, though.”

It was a testament to his growth as a man and a rotten individual that Pitch wasn’t even shocked at the news. “I suppose that rules out one reason for his memory loss,” was all the king muttered, and Tanton made an agreeable noise.

“Have fun shopping,” he snickered, but the tease never even managed to reach the wolf’s eyes, so Pitch just decided to ignore the idiot and left to fetch his coat.

 

Travelling alone with Skørj was unnerving. So used to dematerialising into his shadows, being actually physically carried through smoke and a lightshow to his intended destination was still a foreign feeling to the king, regardless of the fact that he’d been dragged through Yves’s purple smog altogether too many times already.

What was left of his shadows didn’t seem to appreciate the swathing of purple too much either. As soon as the smoke began to cling to Pitch’s clothes, the scratches leaking shadows on his face began to burn unhappily.

Needless to say, he was glad to see the door to Kitrashin appear when it did.

“Oh look it’s Pitch,” the smith deadpanned the moment he caught sight of the king. “Miss us?”

“No,” he said flatly, barely sparing the smith a glance before storming over to the gurgling herbalists on the other side of the room.

“Your face is leaking, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

Pitch grunted at the smith’s dry comment, and when he reached the herbalists’ corner, slapped the list down on their rickety table. The pair stopped babbling at each other just long enough to look up at Pitch.

The Nightmare King managed to suppress the usual cringe he felt whenever he was reminded that the cloaked women were, quite literally, _faceless_ under their hoods, and he held the ominous eyeless stares of both of them.

“I would like this order filled,” he uttered, and the two inclined their entire, gaping faces down toward the piece of parchment Pitch was pressing into the table. He moved his hand away when the women reached for the thing with their weedy, finger-like stalks and proceeded to read through the list together.

They gurgled at each other, wet sounds that literally no one in the Emporium knew how to translate – except, of course, Inari, who was apparently fluent in bubbling herbalist speak.

_Or she just pretends to be_ , Pitch thought as the women lowered the list in unison and Pitch was given a set of gurgled instructions and three raised stalks from each herbalist.

_Are they telling me to wait?_ he wondered, and backed away from the table when they began to slither around themselves, collecting bits and pieces from around their stall and shoving it all into a set of paper bags.

_Guess they are._

“Notice me, oh blind Nightmare King.”

The king rolled his eyes, slightly peeved that the smith was being so damn persistent. But when he turned, ready to sock the guy with some dull retort meant to end a conversation quicker than a war hammer to the head, his eyes caught a glint of black metal and the king went rigid.

How…how did he _forget_?

Scraping his fingers through his hair, Pitch huffed out a dry laugh as he crossed the Emporium. Maybe Tanton had been right with his concern – could just inhaling the steam from the memory tea make him forget about something as important as the scythe he was having made? The weapon that was meant to save his ass from his Nightmares?

Or had he just…forgotten, because his days had been filled with work and sparring and his nights spent sleeping out of pure exhaustion…with not a Nightmare in sight.

_I don’t think either one is exactly a good option_ , he thought. If it was because of the tea, then Pitch didn’t even want to begin to think of the consequences of spending any more time working on the wolves. And if it was the latter…then that meant he was losing his edge.

_My edge is probably as blunt as a spoon by now_ , he internally muttered.

Laying back in his seat, the smith’s wrist flexed and the massive blade resting on the man’s shoulders caught a shred of the light from the chandelier and blasted it straight into Pitch’s retinas. The king cursed, quietly, and when he was close enough, snatched the weapon out of the smith’s hands.

_It still reflects light_ , he thought with a distasteful curl of his lips. _That must be fixed._

But the rest of it…the rest of the weapon was very nice, indeed. It was weighty – not overbearingly so, but comfortably enough that when Pitch swung the thing, nearly taking the smith’s head off in the process, his arms didn’t feel like they were about to be ripped from their sockets.

_Tossing Yanov onto his ass every morning has probably also helped somewhat._

The handle was sturdy and covered in leather strappings that wound up and through the bulk of the scythe blade. And the metal…it was a lustrous black, familiar and razor sharp. Pitch’s fingers brushed against the surface of the metal and he felt, within the folds of the material, movement and breath.

“You made this well,” he murmured. It was unlike any mundane scythe the smith had fashioned for him before. _It might actually work_.

The smith sank back in his chair. “I always make them well. You’re the one who doesn’t treat them kindly.”

Pitch grimaced. “I don’t do it on purpose.”

“The metal was shit to work with, by the way,” the smith mentioned. “I had shadows leaking all over the place whenever I tried to smith it. But that’s something the others never had, so maybe it won’t shatter this time.”

The king nodded, agreeing with the echo of his own thoughts, and the smith added in a dull tone, “But I guess we won’t know until you start cleaving into some Nightmares.”

Pitch had to harden himself against the sensation of disappointment the reminder conjured. A part of him wished that he didn’t have to use such a marvellous weapon against his own mutinying soldiers. But…it was the point, wasn’t it. Survival. Survival of the _strongest_ – and right now, the only way Pitch had a chance of staying at the top of his army’s pecking order was with this scythe.

…if it didn’t explode on him the second he tried to use it.

“Have they always had tentacles?”

Pitch glanced at the smith, then made the mistake of looking over his shoulder and catching an eyeful of some suspicious limbs emerging from beneath the cloaks of the herbalists. For a moment Pitch was caught by the sight of the moving attachments, the spiralling claws and slithering limbs. They all reminded him of the flashes of black, spindly razors crashing into the structure of Skreeklavic’s fortress in the memories of the wolves, the bending and scratching and snapping that every last werewolf felt and heard in those false dreams.

He’s seen enough of those flashes over the past few weeks to grow used to the sounds, the strange stuttering motion of the limbs. He also knew for sure that the limbs of the herbalists, slithering rather grotesquely across their workspace, looked nothing like those in the wolves’ heads.

Yet still he was caught.

Because…wasn’t it here, in this very Emporium, that he had seen something so similar to those flopping limbs? To the creaking arms in the memories of the wolves?

Hadn’t Pitch cornered a loudmouth frost spirit right over _there_ and felt something so decidedly _similar_ to it all?

Pitch’s eyes flickered to the poles surrounding the statue of Inari as he found himself thinking, _Does that mean… Jack’s_ seen _the monster?_

Had the spirit… _seen_ it, lost his memories of the entire experience, but never reacted the same way as the wolves and the workers at the North Pole?

An uneasy feeling settled through the king. He was missing something about this whole picture, something important. They all were – that’s why no one currently holed up in Yves’s realm had progressed anywhere toward a definitive way to eliminate the threat this _thing_ posed.

Or, at least, a way to reap retribution for the pain it had caused.

What was even _worse_ was that Pitch could have _kicked_ himself for forgetting what he’d seen when he’d cornered Jack here that day. Admittedly, he’d been so startled by the orientation of Jack’s fear to properly prioritize what had happened in those moments, but _still_. All this time, he’d been listening to Tanton’s theories about what exactly the monster could be – absurd theories, most of the time, probably accentuated by their long working hours. None of the wolves had seen the full extent of the thing, and Phoenix had apparently adamantly denied catching sight of anything in the forest. But Jack – Jack _had_. He _must’ve_ to have had a fear of those long, snapping limbs before he could’ve possibly heard about the description Pitch had shared with the wolves a few weeks ago.

He must have had, for that fear to have been hidden in a memory that was a hundred and fifty years old.

Pitch’s forehead creased.

So that meant Jack was now the only connection they had to finding out what the monster was. Or, even more importantly, what it _wanted_.

But _how_ were they meant to pry the information out of his mind? Especially considering the state it was descending into.

Pitch’s fingers angrily flexed over the handle of his weapon. He wanted to grab the spirit and… and _rattle_ him until something useful fell from his lips. But he couldn’t, could he? Not at the moment, anyway.

_This is giving me a headache._

“You look irritable.”

Pitch’s eyes slid to the smith. “Do you even know what that is?” he snarled.

The smith raised his hands in surrender, but the gesture was hardly even worthwhile considering the man’s expression was as dull as always. “Just because I can’t feel emotion doesn’t mean I don’t know what it looks like on your sour face. Where’s the kid? I like him better than you.”

_He’s skipping his way through the Guardians’ headquarters, probably getting reminded of all the obvious lapses in judgement he’s been having lately._

When he realised how, yes, _irritated_ the very notion of Jack interacting with the Guardians made him, Pitch made a mammoth effort to quash the feeling. After all, he couldn’t even pass it off as rational, good old paranoid suspicion.

He ignored the smith’s question and snapped, “Did you want your payment now or not?”

The smith rocked forward in his seat and whistled, low and impressed. Pitch was about ready to put his new scythe to good use making a thoroughly _horrific_ mess on Inari’s floors when the smith, luckily for his own sake, relented on his teasing.

“If you’re not going to die in the middle of it,” he said, kicking up the little flap on his table.

Knowing his luck, Pitch probably _would_ , but he had Skørj in his coat pocket at least, so he wouldn’t have to convince the shadows to teleport his own dead body back to Yves’s realm.

“Business has been slow since you’ve been gone,” the smith said casually as Pitch stepped into the man’s cramped little workspace, scythe hanging over his shoulder. “I have a running bet with Inari over how many of our customers come purely to see your scowling face.”

_Purely to_ laugh _at it_ , Pitch bitterly corrected as he shoved the smith back in his seat and splayed an open hand on his chest.

Without even asking if he was ready, the Nightmare King pumped a fist full of fear, pure and undiluted, into the smith’s chest. Darkness that was not entirely unlike his shadows leaked from around his fingers. But this darkness was thinner, less sentient than the shadows, and much, much blacker regardless of Pitch’s waning strength. It was a darkness filled with unheard screams and barely imagined impressions, of watching eyes and rattling chains and the sound of _things_ scraping along floorboards.

It was Pitch’s life, his sustenance, the tangible form of absolute terror. And fed to someone like the smith – someone who, long ago, had been cursed to feel _nothing_ – its effect was immediate and powerful.

The smith’s goggled eyes grew wide, horror contorting his usually blank face, and Pitch watched the man hold onto the fear for as long as he could bear before he shuddered and shoved Pitch’s hand off him.

“Hoo,” he croaked, fear brittling his voice, “that’s some good stuff.”

_It probably beats being permanently apathetic_ , Pitch supposed as he slipped back out of the smith’s stall. But this method of gathering payment… he couldn’t imagine very many people carrying around _nice_ feelings would trade with the weapon smith very often. Obviously Pitch would never be one to advocate anything other than death and gloom and horror and fear, but for someone who lived in emptiness most of the time… it just seemed a little pitiful.

_He does try other methods, though,_ the king remembered, subtly recalling the smith tapping a colourful piece of plastic a few weeks ago and saying something about –

Pitch’s eyes dropped to the smith, an uninvited and quite disgraceful idea forming in his mind. “A while ago you were talking about music.”

With the effects of the fear already visibly fading, the smith reached under his chair and dropped a large box of… _devices_ on the table between them. Pitch peered into the box, and with narrowed eyes, he pulled a golden horn out from amongst the other contraptions.

“I remember this thing,” he muttered, shooting the smith a dark look. The smith just shrugged, as if the weeks Pitch had spent listening to the tone-deaf weapon smith try to make an emotion-provoking tune out of this thing hadn’t been his fault _at all_.

He dropped the horn back into the box with obvious distaste. “Do you need any of this anymore?”

The smith shook his head. “Like I said, the music wasn’t very invigorating. Or stimulating. Or helpful at all, really. Take ‘em, if you want.”

And by “take ‘em”, Pitch knew for a fact that “for a price” was an implied add-on. He appreciated that much about everyone in the Emporium, at least. They never tried to fuck Pitch over with false promises, or, even worse, kind gestures.

_Everyone wants something, at least these merchants are upfront about it._

“What do you want for them?”

The smith gave Pitch a once over, then his goggled eyes travelled to the door and back. “Next time you bring the kid in here, I want some of what he’s got.”

At least it didn’t require Pitch giving up any more of his energy reserves. “I can arrange that,” he agreed.

Across the room, a loud batch of uncomfortably disgusting gurgling drew Pitch’s attention, and he sighed when he saw the pile of twine-covered paper bags waiting for him at the herbalists’ stall.

“This all better be useful,” he muttered as he went to collect up his goods.

 

It took Pitch ten whole minutes to convince the herbalists that _no_ , he was _not_ prepared to cut out his liver and use it to barter for the herbs, because _yes_ , he _did_ have a tab in the Emporium so could they please just do the _normal_ thing and charge whatever the dried twigs cost to the debt he owed Inari.

_It’s ridiculous enough as it is, so some overpriced leaves shouldn’t make much difference to it,_ he thought as he kicked his way through the doorway to Kitrashin, a box under his arm and a scythe over his other shoulder.

And since Pitch had apparently _a lot_ of truly awful karma waiting to just slap him in the face with a wet fish, the moment the Nightmare King emerged from Kitrashin was the same moment he caught sight of Jack’s damn fire spirit for the first time in literally weeks.

And he just happened to be leaning against a tree, wrapped around a rather familiar looking faerie.

“What did I do to deserve this?” Pitch muttered as he hoisted his scythe higher onto his shoulder, the door to Kitrashin disappearing behind him. He began marching off into the snow-littered woods for somewhere more private where he could fumble with all of his equipment in peace.

But the faerie Phoenix was currently in the middle of necking apparently had the hearing of a hound dog, and Pitch had barely broken a frost-snapped twig under his boot before the faerie had leapt off his partner and was giving Pitch a thoroughly shocked look.

Though in hindsight, the expression was nothing in comparison to the sheer horror that appeared on Phoenix’s face when he finally caught sight of the king.

Pitch would have laughed – a dark chuckle of some sort, because he was _evil_ , and looks of shocked horror tickled his fancy. But before his amusement could even amount to something worthy of a laugh, he found himself staring too intently at the peculiar display happening in the faerie’s chest. His fear…it was getting _squashed_ , like he was frantically trying to bury the thing in a suitcase before Pitch could get a good look at it.

His eyes rose to the faerie’s sockets as the fire spirit, predictably, began to kick up a loud fuss. “How the _fuck_ –”

“What are you doing here?” the faerie demanded.

“Shopping,” the king replied thoughtfully, adjusting his load oh so subtly so if the faerie hadn’t (by some miracle of blindness) noticed before, he was more than alerted to the fact that Pitch was carrying a blade that was easily as long the faerie was tall.

The faerie’s eyes flickered to the scythe and he took an obvious step back, a cautious one. A shred of fear slipped free of the struggle, curling up and into Pitch’s view.

And he realised where he’d seen it before.

In the distance, screams filled the forest, and Pitch _tsk_ ed in displeasure. Annoyingly enough, his Nightmares were getting better at sniffing him out, no matter where in the world he was. He would have commended their ruthless persistence if _he_ wasn’t the one on the receiving end of their ruthlessness.

Phoenix flickered a nervous look out into the thick trees around them. “Are they coming for us or you?” he asked, eyes sliding back to examine the king and the weapon he was wielding.

But instead of acknowledging the question, the king spun around and dropped the box of music players and herbs at his feet. “Would you like to be left here to die or give Skreeklavic a hand with the wolves?” he shot back at the fire spirit, pulling Skørj from his pocket.

The scythe blade sitting behind his head twirled with a flick of Pitch’s wrist, and Phoenix and the faerie were forced to duck and dodge so they wouldn’t lose any parts of their faces. “He doesn’t need my help,” the fire spirit grumbled, coming up to stand on Pitch’s left. It didn’t take him long to reconsider the statement, though. When he glanced up and noticed the still-leaking marks on Pitch’s face, his own drew dark with concern. “Unless something happened – did something fucking happen?”

“Skørj, take us home,” Pitch said down to the skull, his tongue curling strangely over the title of their destination.

“Wait – fuck, Dom you coming with?”

The Nightmare King’s gaze slid to the faerie on his right, and whether it was because of Pitch’s less than friendly stance or his own self-preservation, the faerie did a wise thing by shaking his head. “No. I’ll pass.”

Pitch rolled his eyes when he could feel the sentimentality waft off the damn fire spirit, and he was glad when Skørj cracked its jaw wide and began cackling dark, clogging smoke. “I’ll catch you then, yeah?” Phoenix yelled over the skull’s laughter.

The reply of the faerie was barely audible, and it sent a chill of paranoia, the kind that used to always stand on end when he was around his old allies, when the faeries muttered, “Yeah, you will.”

 

A semblance of calm had returned to Yves’s realm when Pitch and the annoying fire spirit were dumped on the king’s lawns. Pitch couldn’t sense any lingering panic in the barracks, so he safely assumed that nothing overly disastrous had happened in his absence. He neglected to inform the fire spirit of as much, though, and let the grumbling idiot dash for the wolves in distress as soon as Skørj’s smoke had cleared.

Which left Pitch alone on the lawns with the owner of the realm, who had emerged from the house to collect his skull only to lose every shred of his amicability when he saw the box of _things_ at Pitch’s feet.

Briskly, the man collected the bag of herbs and Skørj, and the second he went to leave, Pitch growled at the guy.

“ _Yves_ ,” the Nightmare King ground out, because he _knew_ Yves knew what these things were for.

The humanised Halloween King glared back at him. “ _Pitch_.”

Pitch pointed to the box with his scythe and gritted, “ _Do_ something.”

Yves gave the box a nasty look, then pinned one on Pitch. “Why must it be _me_?”

“I have a scythe,” Pitch said, gesturing to the thing.

Amber eyes narrowed. “What difference does that make?”

Pitch’s eyebrow rose, and a very loudly implied, _I will cut you in half if you don’t take the damn box_ crackled through the space between the men. Yves’s glare darkened dangerously.

However, interrupting what was probably about to be a bloodbath between the kings, a snorted laugh came from behind Pitch. The men glared over at the approaching forms of Xani, still bleeding a little from the cuts over her arms and neck, and a wolf Pitch hadn’t bothered cataloguing the name of. But by her absurd haircut, he assumed she must have some relation or another to Clyde.

“What are you two looking so constipated for?” Xani sneered as the other wolf knelt down to inspect the box sitting on the grass between Pitch and Yves.

“Are these all music players?” the blonde wolf asked, eyes wide as she began sifting through the box.

It took Xani all of three seconds to go from appraising in mild bemusement to actually snickering at the very unamused pair of kings. “Is all this for Lani?” she asked, a biting grin curling her mouth.

Yves raised an eyebrow at him, and Pitch groaned inwardly. “Whatever might be of use,” he grunted in the werewolves’ direction.

The wolf kneeling down over the box held up a bunch of the devices. “CD players, cassettes, an iPod? A _horn_? Ooh, how about this!” She stood with one of the smaller contraptions and showed it straight to Xani. “It’s a recorder, doesn’t look like it’d need much battery to run. We can stick this in the attic with her and record a loop of the piano’s song. Then she can have it with her when she’s moving about.”

“What a good idea,” Xani said, a smirk pointed directly at Pitch.

Utterly uninterested, Yves waved a bony hand at them and stalked off toward his house, the bundle of paper bags and Skørj under his arm. “Do whatever you wish.”

Glaring at the retreating king, Pitch was about make an escape of his own (in the opposite direction, of course) when Xani said, “You can’t pretend to be the cool guy when you literally have a box of nice things at your feet.”

He offered the wolf a dark look, which was seriously wasted on these soldiers considering it just made her smirk grow. “I will deny everything,” he said dryly, and pretended he didn’t see the look shared between the two werewolves as he left.

But he didn’t even have enough time to feel indignant about it, anyway, because Pitch had taken all of four steps toward the barracks when a plume of iridescent green smoke exploded in the middle of the fields ahead of him. Skreeklavic and a handful of his wolves emerged from the smoke, coughing and yelling as they covered their ears and bolted for the barracks.

As the green dispersed, Pitch was left staring at the back of a familiar spirit, shoulders low and trembling, slightly, as the chattering skull fell from his fingers onto the dirt at his feet.

 

* * *

 

 

The werewolves were huddled around a fire smoking out of an oil barrel when Jack reached them, most rugged up against the frigid wind while many more were smoking like their lives depended on it. Where they’d gotten their hands on a barrel in the middle of the _North Pole_ was beyond Jack, and it just made their image even more ridiculous.

Especially when set against the backdrop of North’s towering, spiralling Workshop.

“Where’s Skreek?” he asked once a bunch of wolves had ruffled his hair by way of greeting.

“Boss’s inside talking to the scary looking Guardian,” one mentioned. “He has _tats_ , Jack.”

Jack snorted – yeah, they weren’t the only people to be shocked by how badass the harbinger of Christmas really was. But what North lacked in friendly looks he made up with an incredibly soft heart – which made the idea of the man being locked in a room with Skreek utterly _terrifying_.

Casually, oh so casually, Jack dumped Yvorik by the burning oil drum and started off toward the Workshop. He cringed when he heard the skull yell after him in mildly indignant distress. “LOW THERE SPIRIT! Thoust dareth not leaveth the mighty YVORIK in this trooden snoooooow!”

Jack bit his lip and, glancing back down at the flashy skull, said, “The wolves need some culture, Yvorik. You should sing to them about the hummingbirds you just told me about.”

The mentioned wolves looked horrified, and a few of Skreek’s fearless soldiers scrambled toward the skull – to bury it, to toss it into a canyon, anything before it began to –

“OOONCE ON A SNOOOOOWY EEEEEEVVVEEEEEEE –”

There was a collective outcry of anguish from the wolves. Jack snickered to himself for all of a moment, before he spotted a familiar blond wolf by the huge entrance to the Workshop, glaring up at an (unfortunately) equally as familiar yeti.

_I’ve gotta apologise to him_ , Jack told himself as he waded through the snow toward the pair.

_Why not just let your bridges burn. It’d be easier. He’s probably going to sock you in the face as payback._

“I’d deserve it,” Jack mumbled. Then he called, “Clyde!” across the sweeping winds.

Both Clyde and Phil looked over at Jack with varying degrees of hostility, and Jack was relieved that Clyde, at least, had yet to reach Phil’s intensity of hatred toward the spirit.

“I’m sorry for hitting you,” he blurted as soon as he was within hearing distance of the wolf. “I’m also sorry for the things I said.”

The frown that was beginning to work its way onto Clyde’s face vanished in an instant, and Jack felt his heart heave a relieved sigh when the werewolf grabbed him around the neck and mussed his hair like all the others.

“I know you didn’t mean it, snowball,” the wolf said forgivingly. “I’m sorry for hitting you back. I didn’t hurt ya too bad, did I?”

Jack scoffed. “Please.”

They shared a grin, an expression of camaraderie that eased so much pressure from Jack’s body he almost felt like melting into the snow. And then Phil, obviously miffed by the blatant hugging he was witnessing, grumbled something unintelligible but undoubtedly unfriendly at the two them.

Clyde squinted at the yeti before looking down at Jack. “You here for a visit or to see the boss?”

Jack ducked out of Clyde’s hold and gestured toward the large doors. “For Skreek. We’ve gotta get back to Yves’s.”

The wolf’s gaze sharpened. “I’ll rally the troops, then,” he said. But despite his captain-worthy aura and those sharp werewolf senses, it took him at least a dozen steps toward the other wolves to realise that something was amiss with the mob, and a gust of wind for Yvorik’s _permeating_ voice to reach where they stood. “Wait, am I hearing –”

“Good luck!” Jack called as he scrambled inside, Phil thankfully too confused to bother trying to stand in his way for once.

He barely managed to muscle the great door shut behind him before Clyde’s inhuman growl cut through the blustering winds outside, and Jack was so fucking glad there was seven inches of wood between himself and the werewolf with Jack’s name on his tongue.

The inside of the Workshop was as loud and chaotic as ever – despite it being barely days, Jack guessed, after Christmas, everyone was in full swing for next year. It all looked so… _normal_. So natural.

He’d obviously been here weeks ago, after the whole incident, but to know that it was something reoccurring – to know that it could happen _again_ – to know that the resident genius Tanton thought it was just phase one of a two-part scheme, just… it swathed a thick layer of doubt over such a normal, natural scene.

It made the warmth feel unnerving.

At the top of a set of spiral stairs, the spirit found North’s office door closed, the wood doing little to muffle the guffawing happening inside the room.

_Oh god, they’re laughing together_ , Jack thought in a daze, an uncomfortable feeling twisting inside his chest. _Are they even allowed to do that? North…North and Skreeklavic Shadowbent?_

_They’re not. That’s why it’s so fucking revolting for you to be curling up to your arch enemy like a whore._

Jack twitched. “Pitch isn’t my archenemy.”

_He’s the archenemy of the Guardians._

The spirit stilled.

_So what does that make you?_

“– at the door,” Jack heard Skreek say.

Before Jack could think to back up – to fix his expression, to leap off the balcony and hide, to do _anything_ – North’s office door cracked open, and Jack’s throat closed at the sight of the familiar, bearded man staring down at him in surprise.

“Hey, North,” he croaked.

“Jack!” North exclaimed in not-entirely-unhappy shock. “You disappeared for weeks, we wondered if you had run away.”

_Nope, just hiding in a realm while my sanity waned_ , he thought as he tried on one of those smiles that had gotten him nearly bitch slapped by Pitch the other week.

But it stuck somewhere halfway toward a grimace when he realised that North wasn’t making any move to continue their conversation.

He also didn’t open the door any wider.

The smile fell before it could even reach its full potential, and Jack felt that uncomfortable twist in his ribcage grab hold of his heart. His staff spun nervously in his hands. “I, uh, I didn’t come here for a visit.”

North’s bristly eyebrows knitted together in touching concern. “Is there problem?”

Jack swallowed and raised a trembling finger to point through North – toward where he knew a werewolf was sitting on a sofa Jack had once been passed out on for two weeks straight.

North blinked down at himself, and then seemed to realise who Jack was actually gesturing to. With a stunned look on his face that made Jack feel absolutely _sick_ , North stepped out of his own doorway to reveal Skreeklavic Shadowbent sitting on his lounge eating Christmas cake.

_It’s for the wolves, I’m doing this for the wolves, I have to do this for them_ , he told himself as Skreek waved at him.

“Scrawny Jack!” he greeted the spirit, and Jack had to fight off a full-body flinch. That nickname…in _this_ setting? It was strange, too strange _– I have to do this for the wolves, they need their overlord_ – “Fancy seeing you here.”

He winked at Jack, like an absolute whackjob, and the spirit shifted in the doorway, so anxiously aware of North’s stare. “Skreek –”

_Be aware of it. Feel it. This is the disappointment you bring wherever you go._

“You two know each other?” North asked, eyes wide when Jack’s works cut off with a soft choking noise.

Skreek huffed, clearly offended. “You never told your Guardian friends about me, Jack?”

_Just listen to all that disappointment. You really are nothing but a nuisance, Jack._

Jack slapped a hand to his face and tried his best not to scream into it. “Skreek, now’s really not –”

“Now is very much time, Jack,” North interrupted, and Jack peeked through his fingers to see a gut-grabbing sternness on North’s face. The man gestured toward the seat beside Skreek and ordered, “Sit.”

_Looks like your secret little playmates aren’t so secret anymore, Jack. What are you gonna do about it?_

No, _no,_ everyone currently working in Yves’s realm weren’t _secrets_. Jack had never thought of them like that. He’d  just… never volunteered information about them to the Guardians – but if they’d asked, which they never fucking _asked_ –

_Dirty little secrets._

Jack shook his head, _vehemently_ so, and his nails cut into his forehead as he mumbled, “They’re not. I can’t. We can’t. We’ve got to get back –”

“Is everything okay with my wolves?” Skreek asked, an edge in his voice as he set down his cake. “Is Pitch progressing?”

Jack froze. A small noise – a noise that should have conveyed his distress on levels beyond mere words – involuntarily left his throat, but when he looked up through his shaking fingers, he saw that Skreek was staring at him sharply. Oh god, was he doing this on _purpose_?

“Pitch?” North asked warily. Jack flinched back from the doorway, unable to even look at North’s face as he processed whatever he could of Skreek’s little scrap of information. “You do not mean –”

_The destroyer of worlds, the pathetic king doing fucking push ups in another ruler’s realm, the bane of the Guardians’ existence, the villain you’re panting after like some dumb fuck, the man who sits on a throne filled with more darkness and evil than –_

“What’s this about Pitch?”

Jack jolted at the sound of Bunny’s gruff voice, and he was forced to take two shaking steps into North’s office when the Pooka came up behind him and began corralling him with a dark look.

“He’s always up to something shady,” Bunny said with an unhappy sweep of the room. “So what about him?”

North wiped a hand over his face wearily and stomped over to his desk. “Bunny, Pitch is not the only villain in whole world.”

“Yeah, and I’m starin’ at another one of ‘em,” the Pooka grumbled, eyes flashing at Skreek. “Why is Skreeklavic Shadowbent eatin’ cake in your office?”

North and Skreek shared a look that made Jack’s insides scream. North levelled a mysterious stare at Bunny and said, “He came for chat.”

When Bunny glanced at Skreek for confirmation, all he got was a sashay of those wicked eyebrows. Skreek bit into another piece of cake and Bunny crossed his arms over his furry chest, looking about ready to boomerang the werewolf.

Jack, meanwhile, was too terrified of what was happening around him to know if he was glad he was standing as an ignored buffer between the two males, or if he should duck out of the way before he got decapitated.

_If I try to move_ , he thought, a touch hysterically, _he’ll see me and this isn’t what I came here for, this isn’t what I need to do, oh god if we spend much longer here Io and Mo are going to show up and –_

“A _chat_?” Bunny said disbelievingly. “Did he come ‘ere to complain about Pitch, ‘cause that’s all we’re really taking requests for these days. Especially by people like you.”

Despite his churning thoughts, the spirit instinctively bristled at the remark. He noticed that North looked surprisingly on the verge of telling Bunny off for being rude, eyes tightening and mouth opening. But neither had the chance to say a thing before two very predatory eyes narrowed in on the oversized rabbit and Skreek replied, in a voice that barely betrayed the aggression in his eyes, “Why would I have anything bad to say about the gloomy bastard when he’s been helping my army. Us villains gotta stick together, right Jack?”

Like an utter coward, Jack twitched at the mention of his name, and felt a little like burying himself under the floorboards when he realised that Bunny had miraculously been reminded of his existence.

“You’ve been with Pitch this whole time?” the Pooka asked him, as if he was _betrayed_ by Jack’s actions, and the spirit was forced to steel himself as he entered the crosshairs of three very unhappy stares.

_Good and evil mix like oil and water. Glug glug, which makes you some disgusting congealed mess of liquids._

He took a shallow breath.

And since he had literally no idea how he was supposed to act around anyone anymore, let alone around someone like Bunny, who he’d always struggled with even when he was trying to be _himself_ , the spirit muttered, “What are you gonna do, ground me for hanging out with the enemy? Why do you care anyway?”

Considering _everything_ he said to Bunny was wrong one way or another, the Pooka snapped, “I care because you’re meant to be a Guardian. A Guardian that _protects_ children _from_ Pitch. Crikey, do you know how many horrible things he’s done? What a horrible thing he _is_?”

Icy eyes flickered to Bunny, to the extreme levels of incomprehension splattered across his face. “He’s yet to give me the complete rundown of his exploits, but I can imagine.”

The Pooka blanched. “And you don’t _care_?”

_Of course you don’t, because that would make you a hypocrite._

“Right,” he mumbled.

Bunny glared at him. “How are you meant to do your job, remember you actually _have_ _one_ , when you’re making friends with our bloody _enemy_?”

A chill slithered through Jack’s spine. _Friends_? What the hell did Bunny know about anything Jack was trying to do with Pitch? What the hell did he know about what any of it _meant_ to him? The spirit returned the kangaroo’s glare while, on the other side of the room, Skreek threw half a toy soldier at Bunnymund’s head.

“Oi, whaddaya –”

The werewolf overlord pointed a delicate cake fork toward Jack. “Scrawny Jack here once froze my entire castle solid and stopped me from going into what would have been a very lucrative battle. His sense for justice is boringly impeccable, isn’t it Jack?”

The thoughts, of course, scoffed at Skreek’s strange attempt at supporting Jack. _Sense for justice? What a laugh, the only thing you’ve got a sense for is fucking things up._

But, stronger than their mockery, stronger than any ounce of his own self-hatred, was the pure _indignation_ Jack always felt whenever Skreek brought up that ridiculous story. It was an indignation that was so familiar, so calming in its normalcy, that he was unable to stop himself from reaching out and clinging onto the feeling, desperately, and turning a weakly grateful look onto the werewolf.

Skreek’s eyebrows waggled, and Jack felt muscle memory pull words from his mouth, from somewhere calm and happy and safe from the black waters he’d been wading through lately. “You were being a dick, Skreek. Marching an army of half turned wolves through a quaint little village would’ve gotten you guys burnt out of your castle by the villagers you didn’t manage to massacre.”

The words cleared his head as they tumbled from his mouth like a soothing mantra, and by the end of it, a familiar-feeling smirk had laced the corner of Jack’s mouth.

Skreek began to grin, slow and wicked with a hint of genuine malice. “And ya know I still haven’t forgiven ya, boy.”

“Do I look worried?”

North cleared his throat awkwardly. “Let private talks be private,” he advised.

And just like that, the clarity was washed away. Jack swallowed, smirk disappearing as guilt seared through his insides. It was _his_ fault North looked so uncomfortable in his own home, so for the umpteenth time, he tried to tell Skreek that they had to get _going_.

But there was another problem.

“Why’re you tryna run, Jack?” Bunny demanded, looking like he was on the verge of an aneurism.

Jack’s eyes narrowed when it was clear that the Pooka was making no move to get out of the doorway. “Back off Bunny. I didn’t come here to stand around taking to you.”

“Funny that, ‘cause I came here hopin’ to catch you. You haven’t been to Sandy yet, mate.”

Jack blinked at him. “What?”

“You heard me.”

“Why does that even matter right now?” the spirit scoffed. “I don’t _need_ to see Sandy. What we _need_ is to –”

“Really?” Bunny interrupted, a brow rising, and Jack felt an itch of anxiety prickle along his windpipe. “’Cause in my opinion, what happened in the attic teamed with you talking to yourself the way I found ya a few weeks ago, _definitely_ warrants some talking to Sandy.” He stepped up to Jack so he could jab the spirit in the forehead like an absolute asshole. “Not to mention fraternising with Pitch probably means something in your noggin is well and truly broken.”

Jack violently smacked the paw away with his staff. “Don’t touch me,” he ground out, barely needing more of a reminder of what his head was already screaming at him all day long.

The Pooka’s eyes widened before narrowing angrily. “Stop being a dill and go and get your head checked before you become even more of a bother than you already are.”

_Couldn’t have said it better myself._

“Fuck you,” Jack spat.

Bunny froze at the sound of the venom, and out of the corner of Jack’s blurring vision, he could see North recoil just as quickly. Skreek, on the other hand, just wolf-whistled Jack into even deeper shit.

“What did you say to me.”

Jack looked up at the dark, menacing expression Bunny was trying to pull off. But with all that fur and his immense pride, it came off looking like nothing more than a petulant bunny about to stamp his huge feet on the ground in some form of a tantrum.

_Have some respect for people who actually do some good in this world_ , his thoughts growled.

_Yeah, I already know whose side you’re on_ , Jack thought back at them as he felt a tiny shard of himself – a shard that had once believed that shutting up and getting walked over was a better idea than burning bridges of friendship – _crack_.

_What does it even matter when there’s no friendship here anyway?_ he thought as his head tilted to the side and poison leaked from the back of his mind into the front, and finally onto his tongue.

“I said fuck you,” the spirit snarled coldly, and Bunny backed up a step. “If I’m such a fucking nuisance then why do you give a shit? _Huh_? If I’m such a pathetic, dirty little spirit then just fucking –”

“ _JACK_.”

The words stuck in Jack’s throat at the sound of North’s alarm, and the spirit looked over at the owner of the Workshop only to flinch back at the actual anger on North’s face.

_No no, fuck I shouldn’t have done that. I can’t do this – I can’t_ _–_

A paw grabbed Jack’s arm and the spirit was yanked out of the room. He cursed at the rabbit as he was being dragged across the balcony, and somewhere, behind him, Skreek threw his metal leg in the way of North rushing out to break the two males up.

“Jack can skewer the runt if he tries anything,” the werewolf said.

Which made absolutely no difference to the look of deep concern on North’s face. “This is what I worry about,” the man murmured.

With joyous confetti and various flying objects (none of which were burning or broken, thankfully) raining down from the higher floors, Bunnymund hauled Jack just far enough away from North’s office so the Pooka could yell at him without causing a scene – or at least, that’s what Jack assumed the rabbit had in mind. Otherwise Bunny was just doing a fabulous job of wasting Jack’s time because he had a _job_ to do here – Pitch and Tanton had told him to get Skreek, and he hadn’t even managed to get the werewolf out of North’s office yet. What if something else had gone wrong in Yves’s realm? What if Skreek was desperately needed and Jack was _failing_ like he always did –

Jack jerked his arm out of Bunny’s hold, and the Pooka huffed a dry laugh as he scrubbed a paw over his ears. “Blimey, you’ve got a mouth on ya.”

He had nothing to say about that. Everyone who _knew_ him knew that Jack could manhandle a vocabulary nearly as roughly as Phoenix could, and that it was undoubtedly a product of spending altogether too long in the fire spirit’s vicinity.

_Maybe it might start returning to something less vile now that he’s avoiding me_ , he thought with a tinge of sadness.

“Oh, and Christmas went fine without you here.”

Jack glared at the Pooka. “The only reason _you_ were here helping was because Tooth told you to.”

Bunny spun and looked at him in surprise. “You heard that?”

Hah, every _fucking_ time. “What, you think I’m stupid _and_ deaf now?”

Bunny sighed, hands on his hips as he stared up at the gaping hole in North’s roof as if something – no, _someone_ – could help him out with this shitty spirit. “No I don’t think you’re stupid, mate. I just think you’re making some shocking decisions.”

The softer tone ate away a tiny bit of Jack’s anger. He forced himself to breathe long, hopefully calming breaths as he murmured, “Well they’re mine to make.”

“Maybe they shouldn’t be.”

Those four simple words had fear tearing through the spirit’s throat and oh look, the anger was back. “I’m not some animal you can keep on a leash and tug at every time I try to piss on a tree,” Jack shouted, feeling so goddamn hurt that he even had to _have_ this conversation with the Pooka. “Is that how you think of me?”

He gestured around the Workshop with his staff as he marched toward Bunny. “We’ve been in the same boat for ten years, Bunny, I can’t even _believe_ that you still hate me this much when we’ve done so many things together.”

Jack exhaled a little laugh when he saw that the Pooka was just staring at him, looking more than speechless and utterly unhappy. “I mean I get it, I’m not likable – I get _that_. But can’t you even try to _see_ a little bit of me?” A hand reached up his throat, past his jaw until he found hair he could just _yank_ at. “Or maybe you did and that’s why you treat me like this.”

Bunny made a low noise, one that Jack thought was meant to be a soothing one. “Hey, look –”

“Don’t touch me,” the spirit snapped when another furry paw came for him. “I said don’t fucking touch me. _I_ get to decide where I go and who I go there with. _I_ get to decide what I do with my life and my body. I don’t take orders from you or anyone else.”

“I’m not giving you orders!” Bunny yelled. “And I’m not going to take anything away from you, Jack. You can be a naïve kid sometimes, but this? _Seriously_? I’m trying to protect you from doing something that’ll _hurt_ you.”

Jack snorted at the pit of irony Bunny had no _idea_ he was practically swimming in. “Where was that protection when I actually needed it,” he muttered as he turned from the Pooka and collapsed back against the balcony rail, head tipped back so he could see all the spiralling floors above him.

“What did you say?”

Jack’s gaze tilted further, until he caught North’s huge globe in his sights and his chest burned with the stretch. He licked his dried lips, lamenting, for a moment, how well the wound on his mouth had healed. Running his tongue along the cut had offered a painful distraction from his own mind more than once – until Pitch had grabbed his tongue one day and threatened to cut it out if Jack didn’t let the wound heal.

“Protect me from what?” the spirit replied, gaze snapping to the Pooka when he caught the guy move. “From playing house with Pitch? You know, he’s a pretty shitty guy sometimes, but he doesn’t treat me the way you do.”

Bunny spluttered at that, and began some indignant rant about how evil Pitch was, about how manipulative he was, about everything Jack already knew until the spirit’s thoughts began to pipe in with the occasional, _Hear, hear!_ and Jack got sick of the entire conversation.

He pushed off the balcony, brushing bits of confetti out of his hair as he met the Pooka in the middle of the walkway. Something in Jack’s expression made the rabbit mercifully stop talking, and the spirit swung his staff onto the ground.

“I’ll let you in on a secret, Bunny,” he said easily, and the Pooka narrowed his eyes. “I know when I’m being talked down to. I know when you look at me and you’re thinking, _he’s such a stupid fuck_. I know when you try to send me out on errands so I don’t make you look bad in front of other people.”

Bunny recoiled as if Jack had actually hit the guy. “I don’t do any of that!”

The denial made Jack’s blood freeze into jagged spikes, and without even really meaning to, his anger poured into his staff and a blast of cold, frigid air and ice blew out from where the staff touched the wooden floor.

Clearly unprepared, Bunny fell back on his ass and went to grab his boomerangs on reflex. Jack squatted down next to the guy and Bunny’s paws paused on his weapons. His eyes were glued to Jack’s face, the latter’s gaze as cold as the ice winding around his fingers as the spirit snarled, “I spent years and years and YEARS clocking the movements of an unpredictable psychopath. My self-preservation might have some gaping flaws, but it makes up by being _very_ observant.”

It was why the lies never worked, why the manipulation was so transparent, why the condescending tones were always received with a smile that never _dared_ to betray how angry they made the spirit. He’d lived through hell once upon a time, a hell he and Phoenix still couldn’t talk about even on the brightest of days, a hell that had left him with so much _fear_ , so much _insecurity_ , that he’d had to spend over a hundred years trying to bury it all in the smiling faces of children, in the laughter his snow days always brought, to even be _able_ to smile again.

But he’d learnt from it. He’d learned _so much_ from it that to say he was naïve or stupid was nothing more than a denial of _everything fucking thing_ he went through –

“What has he done to you?”

Jack rocked back at the sound of the question, panicking, for a terribly long second. Bunny knew? He _knew_ –

_For fuck’s sake, pull yourself together._

The ice had hardened around his hand and forearm, and more glued his feet to the floorboards. A sprinkling of frost reached out around Jack like a cold, crystalized puddle, on the very edge of which sat jagged spikes of ice that had erupted from the floor. Bunny was just beginning to shiver from the cold when Jack rasped a confused, wary, “ _Who_?”

Bunny gaped. “Who _else_? Pitch!”

_And you say I never pay attention._

They didn’t – not when they didn’t want to, at least – but Bunny’s words had Jack realising something else with a painful jolt. Something that _he_ hadn’t realised.

That Pitch… that Pitch wasn’t the hell that Jack had lived through so long ago. Which of course Jack always _knew_ , but he had never consciously acknowledged. Pitch was evil and he was sadistic, but there were so many things about him that weren’t the same. _Pitch_ wasn’t the same.

All this time, Jack had been wary of the king, if not consciously then definitely somewhere in his own mind, because somewhere along the line he’d gotten stuck back _there_ again. He’d made the mistake too many times of thinking that Pitch worked in the same way as _they_ had, that something like sex could manipulate him, that his anger was something to be afraid of.

But Pitch was Pitch. He was different, and he was _weird_ , and Jack had no idea how the guy worked and that scared him a little, but he was probably just doing some strange Pitch thing, right?

_“Do you honestly think I’d be able to – or I would even_ want _to – say no to the terror rolling off a little thing like you when you’re beneath me?”_

The spirit’s legs gave out, and he fell on the floor beside Bunny.

Had those words been for Jack’s benefit, or Pitch’s?

After all, the spirit had all of these problems that he had to keep a list of, that he had to keep others away from. Could Pitch have been following a similar set of rules?

_“Dubious consent is not one of my kinks –”_

This time, when soft fur touched Jack’s shoulder, the spirit was too caught in his own horror to scream at the Pooka. He was choking on his own insensitivity, at the disgusting thing he’d done by unconsciously shoving Pitch into the same rotting basket as –

_“I won’t do anything you don’t want me to.”_

Cold burnt behind the spirit’s eyes.

“Mate,” Bunny said softly, paw squeezing Jack’s bony shoulder, “if he’s manipulating you, if he’s keeping you with him –”

But Jack was shaking his head. “He wouldn’t do that.”

Bunny…Bunny looked at him _pityingly_ , and Jack twitched away from his touch. “You don’t know what he’s capable of. The things he’s done –”

“What _things_?”

“He destroyed my home!” Bunny growled, anger and pain and bitterness filling his eyes. Jack slid back on the ice, heart thudding a little too loudly as Bunny slammed fist down onto the frost. “He _obliterated_ it. Swept it out of existence and left me without my home, without my family. He took everything I had. _Everything_.” He turned pleading eyes onto Jack, eyes so full of ancient pain that Jack could barely stand to hold them. “So can’t you see what I see when you come in here with Skreeklavic Shadowbent yammering on about Pitch _helping_ you guys?”

The ice in his veins punched through flesh, tendons. Pain danced across Jack’s skin, pain he couldn’t pack away, pain that slithered into his mind and had his forehead crumpling. “You see me as the enemy,” he murmured, his world blurring as he tried to get to his feet, to get away from the mess he’d created, from the people who hated him –

“No!” Bunny yelled, grabbing Jack’s sleeve and forcing him to stop. “I see a spirit who’s probably got some good intentions going on in there, but you’re goin’ to get hurt Jack. Killed, even.”

He blinked and clarity returned to his vision, but it was the sight of Bunny staring up at him with wide, distressed eyes.

“I don’t think I’d mind,” the spirit whispered, his voice breaking just a little, and Bunnymund, beneath all that warrior fur, went very pale.

“Jack –”

Jack yanked his sleeve out of the Pooka’s hold and cried, “ _Skreek_!” back toward North’s office.

To his immense relief, Skreek was already plodding across the balcony toward him. North was following a pace behind the huge wolf, and when both of them caught sight of the position Jack had left Bunny in, a mixture of concern and alarm clouded North’s face.

Skreek, on the other hand, wasn’t the least bit fazed by this sort of shit. The werewolf just took one look at Jack’s shaking frame and the icy mess he’d made and grabbed the spirit round the head with a beefy arm and said, “Alright, boy, I’m coming, I’m comin’. Thanks for the cake, North. I’ll give you the number of a good psychic I know. Obviously not Pitch, but someone nearly as good. Unless you want Pitch’s number?”

Despite the downward set of his mouth and the blatant worry etched across his face, North still managed a dry look. “I am thinking the psychic would be better choice.”

“Yeah, you’re probably right,” Skreek conceded with a chuckle. He tugged Jack along as he began clomping toward the staircase, and the spirit was honestly too wrecked to even bother trying to pry the werewolf’s arm off his head. “Let’s get a move on, Jack.”

“Where are you taking him?”

“ _Bunny_ ,” North sighed.

Skreek’s footsteps stopped on the hard wood, and he turned back to the Pooka. Jack couldn’t see the expression on his face, but he imagined from the sharp intakes of breath he could hear that it was not very friendly. “Look at all that bravery. How about you turn tail and run, rabbit, and ill sic my wolves on your fluffy little behind. We could make a show of it.”

“Skreek,” Jack muttered, and the werewolf gave him an obedient “Yes, yes” before heading off again.

“Don’t go back with them!” Jack heard Bunny call in their wake. “You’re meant to be one of us, Jack. A _Guardian_. Do you want to throw that away?”

_Yeah, Jack, do you wanna throw it away? Become nobody again? Just a homeless waste of space drifting between blizzards?_

“Don’t listen to him,” Skreek said lowly as they approached the main door, “you’re not throwing anything away, lad.”

Jack knew Skreek was probably right. Officially, anyway, there probably had to be paperwork and shit done to actually expel Jack from the Guardian covenant.

…So why did it feel like he was leaving something behind as he stepped out into the northern winds?

Jack buried his face into Skreek’s ribs and took a deep, shaking breath of the man’s patterned vest. For once, the thing wasn’t an eyesore – the material was a soft, bloody velvet in some places, and gold in others – and apparently Yves had loved the material so much he’d had Skreek’s I’m Sorry For Trying to Eat You suit made out of the stuff.

The decision had required the pair to take a trip into the middle of some vampire cavern to have the material woven and the suit made, a story Skreek guaranteed he’d only ever be telling when he was too drunk to be creeped out by the ordeal.

He remembered Yves and Skreek returning to Yves’s house the next morning, Yves bright eyed and hugging his new suit while Skreek hobbled to the nearest liquor cabinet in dazed horror, and the spirit smiled just a little. It was only a trickle of warmth, but he could hold onto this.

_You think pathetic memories like that will make your decisions any better? Any less wrong?_

“Don’t they?” Jack murmured as he wormed away from the wolf, grateful for the comfort but feeling a little twitchy beneath it.

“We’re taking Skørj back right?” he asked as up ahead, wolves began putting out their cigarettes and dumping snow into their oil barrel.

Skreek eyebrows hitched. “Skørj? I don’t have Skørj. Don’t you have it?”

Jack balked. “No! I thought… wait, how did you even get here?”

“Yves reverse-blasted us.”

…Which was the technical term for getting transported while the skull got left behind at the previous destination. An undertaking which, unfortunately, was something only Skørj would do – Yvorik always kicked up a fuss whenever anyone tried to abandon it. “Then how were you meant to get back?”

Skreek grinned mischievously. “I was planning on giving North’s globes a test whirl.”

Jack grimaced at the very thought, and he groaned out loud when Clyde signalled for a wolf who’d been exiled with Yvorik to come back to the extinguished fire.

“Ah,” Skreek said when he noticed what, exactly, the haggard wolf was returning with. Jack detected a hint of genuine dread in the overlord’s voice, and Jack pressed his forehead into his staff with another soft groan. “I don’t suppose North would still give me one.”

Jack rolled his eyes as the returning wolf caught sight of the spirit and, probably blaming Jack for everything wrong in his life, narrowed his eyes and hurled Yvorik at him like a star baseball player delivering his final pitch. The skull screamed all the way into Jack’s cold hands, where he slapped the skull on its bony, hollow cheeks and said, “Please do us the pleasure of taking us home, Yvorik.”

With a _hmph_ and a loud cough, the skull started up the song about a pair of star-crossed hummingbirds getting cursed by a jar of moving eyeballs, and the wolves began to howl as green smoke poured around them.

As emerald filled his vision and Jack had to squeeze his eyes shut against the blindness, his mind began to drift in the darkness, anxiety prickling and waning, the water sloshing and curling and taking _more_ from him.

Yvorik’s voice, layered and sonorous and echoing, cut with a duller and duller blade until all Jack could hear was the terrible sound of his own head layering over the cries of the wolves.

_You screwed up, Jack._

“I know.”

_You’ll regret this. You should have stayed with them. The Guardians are the only ones who can give you what you want. A chance to change. A chance to be something._

“We don’t change,” he murmured as the shouts of the wolves became distant, interrupted only by the sounds of footsteps.

Jack’s eyes cracked open and he stared at the retreating figures of the wolves, Yvorik absently slipping from his hand and hitting the dirt beneath his feet.

“We don’t change,” he repeated. “So I have to tell him. Otherwise we’re going to get nowhere because I’m too fucked in the head and Pitch… Pitch probably just wants to know what he’s dealing with.”

_Ugh, you have a disgustingly one-track mind._

“It’s important.” He exhaled a weak laugh. “And what else am I meant to do while I wait for North and Bunny to officially kick me out?”

_Tell him then. You’re still a piece of trash whether he knows or not._

Jack snorted and, grabbing the complaining Yvorik from the dirt, turned only to see the man he was thinking about standing on the grass by Yves’s house.

With a terrifying scythe draped across his shoulders.

In an instant, every horrible thing Bunny had been yelling about Pitch came back to him in a sweep of abuse – of mottled acid and hues of accusation doused in dirt.

_“He destroyed my home!”_

And yet, what did it say about Jack’s character when all it took was the Nightmare King tilting his head ever so slightly, silver and gold eyes piercing straight through Jack’s flesh, for all the acid and grime to vanish like a dying shadow. For all the things he should care about as Bunny’s….teammate, to just disappear.

_I don’t care,_ he thought, hating himself, just a little, for the truth of it. _I just want this so badly_.

_Don’t forget I can still make you scared of touching him._

Jack’s tongue touched his bottom lip. He watched Pitch’s eyes flicker to the movement, and, regaining a sense of his will to fight, murmured, “We’ll see about that.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Classic Bunny vs Jack angst.


	23. A Small Victory

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Jack and Pitch share a moment of victory amongst a scenic landscape, and the Nightmare King schemes with the other villains over some boiling hot chocolate.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Part 3 of the update (chapter 21 = part 1)
> 
> Also, brief WARNING, Jack mentions a bit of what happened in the shitty relationship (type thing) he had in the past.

Yves’s dinners had grown considerably since that first night Jack had fought for Pitch to stay. Instead of just one bench lined with villains, Yves now had several tables scattered around the dead lawn at the back of his house, all filled with werewolves who worshiped Yves’s cooking nearly as much as their own leader.

They were warm dinners, full of noise and laughter, but for Jack they were always accompanied by a hint of darkness. And if it wasn’t provided by his thoughts’ running commentary on _everything_ , then it was because when Phoenix wasn’t actively avoiding him, he was sitting on a completely different table to Jack, his back to the frost spirit in a way that had Jack struggling to breathe.

Tonight was one of those nights.

_He’s just being smart_ , he told himself as he saw Phoenix and Tanton duck their heads low in conversation. _After all, I keep accidently yelling at him whenever he talks to me._

“If you keep pining, boy, I’ll lose my appetite.”

As if _anything_ could make Skreek actually lose his appetite. Jack made a face at the wolf, and when Yves wasn’t looking, he created an ice cube on the table’s surface and flicked the thing into Skreek’s soon-to-be-lukewarm soup.

To his right, Pitch smirked just a little, obviously noticing Jack’s minor revenge. The king wasn’t a regular at these meals – like a typical antisocial asshole, he usually fucked off by himself or kept working through the evenings.

But sometimes, on the good days, Jack found a warm presence slipping onto the bench beside him, and he always had to bite his lip to stop a proud grin from reaching his face.

The feeling returned now, and for a moment, the spirit just wanted to smile at the grumpy man. He wanted to murmur something playful to the king to get him scowling again. But in the corner of Jack’s vision, all he could see was a fire spirit who should have been sitting so much closer than he actually was, and in his heart he was selfishly worrying with renewed vigour about his answer to Pitch’s question.

About how the man was going to react.

_Obviously with disgust, who do you think you’re talking about?_

“Pitch,” the spirit answered without thinking. The man glanced at him, a brow rising questioningly, and Jack’s tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth and refused to move.

He shook his head and couldn’t help but flinch when a semi-friendly fireball erupted a couple of tables over.

Pitch shot a disgruntled look over toward the fire spirit, muttering something under his breath that was utterly and unsurprisingly unfriendly. Jack mentally snorted at the guy, and he took note that the cuts on his jaw were doing an adequate job of knitting themselves back together.

Barely.

And then Jack caught Pitch’s arm extending, his hand reaching into one of Yves’s terracotta bowls and securing a roll of homemade bread. The king appraised the food, just for a moment, and then went right ahead tore into the thing with his teeth.

Jaw dropping in shock, Jack gasped, “You’re _eating_?”

The look he got from the king was withering at best. “I’m hungry,” he said as he chewed, eyeing the bread in his hand as he swallowed and took another bite.

The spirit was speechless – no, actually, he was _concerned_ , because was this some sort of psychological symptom of spending too much time around the Baking King, or was Pitch trying to supplement food for what he really should be eating –

“Pitch!” Skreek cried, throwing his hands into the air. “Oh, I’m so proud. _Gah_ , Yves, I think I’m going to cry.”

“Please do not.”

Pitch gave the werewolf a flat look as he tore the roll in half. “This is good,” he said to the king across the table.

“It is bread,” Yves said with half a smirk on his face.

“It’s good,” Pitch gritted out, his expression darkening.

Yves’s smirk grew. “You are welcome.”

Jack and Skreek shared a look, Jack obviously confused about what kind of pissing contest Pitch and Yves always seemed to be engaged in lately, while Skreek’s eyebrows just did one of their more suspicious dances.

Jack began to frown. “Skreek –”

“I can see why you don’t wanna go joining the Guardians, Pitch,” Skreek suddenly said, and if Jack hadn’t promised Pitch that he wouldn’t inflict any bodily harm on himself, he would have introduced his face into the wooden table. “Not even for the cake, and my, that was some damn good cake – oh, but not as good as your cakes, Yves, don’t worry.”

Yves huffed and Pitch’s eyes, understandably, narrowed in intense suspicion.

“I don’t even know how you put up with ‘em for so long, Jack boy. Seems like you and that rabbit don’t get along too well.”

Silver eyes landed on the side of Jack’s head, and Jack flicked a wary glance at Pitch before settling his gaze onto the knots in wooden table. “He’s… I don’t know. I guess we don’t. The rest of them aren’t bad though,” he added, feeling a need to defend Tooth and Sandy and North even if he was probably going to be shunned by them all the next time he saw them.

The thought made his stomach hurt – but then again, most things did lately, so for now he just tucked away the feeling along with all the others.

“Eh, the heroic kind ain’t really my cup of tea.”

Before Skreek could turn some thinly veiled leer onto Yves, Jack muttered, “You seemed to be getting along with North when I got there.”

Skreek pointed his spoon at Jack. “See, North, I can like. He’s a bit too jolly but he’s got that look in his eyes that’ll cut as good as those swords of his –”

Bowls clattered on the table, and Pitch stood abruptly. He muttered some backhanded thank you to Yves as he swung his legs over the bench seat and walked right on into the house.

Jack stared after him anxiously, half inclined to get up and follow him like some _leech_. Then he forced himself to take a breath and just calm the fuck down. Pitch was a grown ass man who could be grumpy when he wanted to be – Jack just needed to breath and _fuck_ , crack his fingers out of the ice he’d made on the table.

Over on the other bench, Jack caught Phoenix’s semi-narrowed stare directed at him for all of a moment before the fire spirit returned to his conversation with Tanton.

“Was it something I said?” Skreek asked with an innocent look on his face that was chockfull of bullshit.

“It was definitely something you said,” Yves affirmed with a nod.

The wolf laughed. “A bit of jealousy never hurt anyone. Don’t look so miserable, Jack.”

The spirit quietly mourned the lack of heat in the space next to him as he sent Skreek a cold look. “Being jealous would imply that he actually cares, Skreek. Don’t overestimate his emotional capacity.”

“Ooh ho ho. He seemed pretty caring today, from what Xani and Clair told me.”

Jack raised an eyebrow at that, and Yves explained with a hint of resentment, “He came bearing a box of contraptions so the banshee may leave my attic.”

“Contraptions?”

“Music players,” Skreek answered with a strange full-body wiggle. “Lots of ‘em.”

Jack’s heart twinged a little, probably swooning the damn thing, as his eyes unconsciously swept toward the house. The spirit vaguely remembered the smith showing them a CD when he’d first met the guy, so maybe Pitch had stolen some stuff when he’d gone and picked up that massive fucking scythe of his.

With a guilty start, Jack realised that his comment from that morning hadn’t been all that insightful after all. _I’d called him sadistic, but it’s like the guy’s drawn some fine line between being a sadist and a complete gentleman and he’s tap-dancing on the thing like an absolute, sociopathic_ pro _._

“So jealousy is definitely on the table,” Skreek concurred, but the words were lost on Jack.

_Stop being a pussy and do it_ , he told himself as he leapt over the bench seat.

_Yeah, do it. I love watching you fuck everything up._

“Then shut up and watch,” he muttered as he made his way from the dinner gathering, barely hearing Skreek’s gasp of, “Egh, my soup’s cold!” and Yves’s growled, “ _What did you say about the soup_?” as he left.

At the heart of some frighteningly domestic scene, Pitch was at the sink violently washing dishes when Jack nudged the back door ajar enough for him to slip through. With a towel slung over his shoulder, his sleeves were rolled up to his elbows as soap suds crawled up his arms. Jack watched the angrily intent expression darken on the king’s face, and he wondered for a moment if just maybe Pitch had enough emotion in him to be just a _little_ bit jealous of Jack seeing the Guardians.

Just enough to reaffirm whatever they were trying to do, here.

_As if you’re that important. If anything, it would reaffirm his hatred for you._

Jack flinched, anxiety involuntarily welling within him, and before he could say anything, sharp eyes filled with gold cut straight to where he was standing in the doorway.

At the sight of him, Pitch seemed to take a single breath that loosened his shoulders a little. “What do you want?” he bit, tossing a soap-covered bowl a little too roughly onto the countertop.

_I told you to shut up and watch, right?_ he thought as he opened his mouth and, before he could so much as hesitate, blurted, “It would stop the arguments.”

Pitch went positively still, and Jack had to inhale a pathetically shaky breath before he continued. His fingers flexed around his staff, wood biting beneath his fingernails as the sounds from outside became muffled, muted, dulled by the vacuum of air and safety Jack was creating just by mentioning this out loud.

Because he’d never talked about this – not even with Phoenix, who already _knew_ , but had never admitted to it.

_Apart from when the idiot practically yelled it in front of everyone on Halloween._

He glanced up and saw gold, brilliant dancing gold, and let the breath he’d been holding escape. “The yelling and the manipulating – sex was always just that little bit more entertaining than fighting, so it was always the alternative they took.”

He swallowed. “It fucking sucked. It – I, I wasn’t as good at dealing with pain then and –”

_Ugh, this is making me nauseas._

Pitch’s tone was sharp when he asked, “They didn’t know what they were doing?”

Jack exhaled a laugh that, two hundred years ago, would have been riddled with pain, but now it just held the aged bitterness of hindsight. “They knew.”

Pitch said nothing, and Jack felt the silence cut through his nerves. “It always seemed to work,” he added lamely.

_Except that time it didn’t._

Jack flinched, throat tightening. “Please don’t think I’m a whore,” he whispered.

His thoughts sent a lance of pain through Jack’s head, and the spirit had to grip his staff tighter to stop himself from reaching for his skull. _You see the irony of this, right?_ they spat. _Laying out one of your worst fears for the_ king of fear _, and asking him not to do exactly what he’s programed to? If he turns around and calls you everything you’re afraid of, or even better, if he comes at us with some disgusting intent, you’ll deserve all of it because you were LYING when you said your self-preservation has a few_ flaws _, Jack. There are gaping holes the size of PLANETS and all the rest of it is too cold to even function._

A nervous tremor passed down the spirit’s spine as the words roared through his mind, and when his shoulder brushed against something slick, he startled when he realised ice had begun to grow over Yves’s doorframe.

“Shit _shit_ ,” he murmured, digging his fingers beneath the crystals and prying them off.

In a low, even tone, Pitch finally spoke. “Why are you standing over there?”

A clump of ice fell to the floor and Jack admitted, quietly, “So I can run if you’re disgusted.”

Out of the corner of his vision, he saw Pitch throw his towel onto the bench and gesture with a minute tilt of his head. “Come here.”

A shiver curled around Jack’s spine as the last piece of ice fell and was promptly kicked outside. Warily, he dragged himself over toward the king, and as soon as he got within reaching distance, Pitch snatched him by the waist of his hoodie and pressed Jack back into the kitchen bench.

The spirit went to object to the blatant manhandling when Pitch’s fingers wrapped around his wrist – the wrist attached to the hand holding his _staff_ – and the objection died in his throat.

“Let go of it,” the king demanded, eyes brightening with the obvious panic his words evoked.

_You’re an idiot if you think –_

“No, I –”

“You’ve done it before,” Pitch reminded the spirit, voice close and warm and drawing a cold through Jack that had the spirit remembering strong hands and deep growls, the sight of Pitch so caught by lust that he’d left himself wide open for Jack’s razor sharp flirting.

The spirit glanced at the grey skin wrapped around his sleeve, at the eyeful of tattoos he could barely make out because his arm was trembling and it was making the images dance, _move_ –

His grip loosened, and his only means of defence clattered to the floor.

And then Pitch’s fingers were curling tighter, his eyes growing deep with fear and gold and Jack barely had a chance to swallow before the king’s other hand was biting into the bench by Jack’s hip and he was trapped by a man who looked so fucking _angry_.

“I know you people do not expect much from me –,” he began to snarl.

Jack’s heart climbed into his throat. “Wait, Pitch –”

“– but I am _not_ some damn –”

Without thinking, Jack’s free hand flung up to Pitch’s face, clamping over the king’s angry mouth. He knew Pitch had done this to him before, practically in the same place too, so he just hoped the king wouldn’t outright kill him as he hurriedly said, “Pitch! I _know_! I’m sorry I just didn’t know what to _do_. I didn’t want to attack you just in case it made you hate me, so all I had were my words and you know how to fucking twist them so _good_ – so, so that was all I had left, and sometimes I can swallow it down like I did in Kitrashin but sometimes everything’s just too loud and my instincts go back to how it was then and –”

The king’s eyes narrowed dangerously, and Jack quickly removed his hand from Pitch’s face, mindful of the cuts on his jaw. “I’m so sorry,” he murmured.

With a heavy sigh, Pitch let go of his wrist. “Stop apologising.”

He gravitated away from the spirit, turning and letting himself lean against the counter as he appraised the smaller male with eyes splattered gold with fear. It took Jack a moment to pull himself out of his own panic and realise that Pitch was giving him an odd look – one which made the spirit very fucking nervous. “How long ago was this?”

“Long enough that I should be over it by now,” Jack muttered. When he felt Pitch shift threateningly at the vague answer, he quickly added, “Two hundred years, give or take. But I haven’t been on the – you know, the receiving end during sex since, so…”

The request was unspoken, just a slim, quaking fear hoping to be acknowledged by the part of the Nightmare King who could understand – not the terrifying, cruel part that didn’t want to.

Silently, Pitch shifted  at Jack’s side, and the spirit’s head ducked just a little when the king lowered his mouth to growl a very dark, very confident, “I can break you into pieces without needing to fuck you, so I’m not too concerned,” right along the shell of Jack’s ear.

The spirit shivered, aching, somewhere deep within him, to cry in relief that by some gift of the universe, Pitch in all of his scary glory hadn’t taken Jack’s fear as a challenge.

_Maybe he just didn’t want to fuck a bony whore like you in the first place._

He inhaled a ragged breath. “I’m – I…”

Pitch’s eyes were too gold, but they contained a shred of softness that had whatever Jack was trying to choke out curling up somewhere in his throat. “I don’t care, Jack,” he said lowly, honestly, and Jack’s heart could have died happily right then and there.

_Don’t be so fucking pleased. The bastard’s just outlining the terms of a contract._

“Still,” the spirit whispered.

Bravely, his fingers brushed against Pitch’s shirt, and when neither his head nor the king made an objection to the touch, his fingers knotted in the material. “The rest of that laundry list of shit you said this morning.”

Pitch allowed himself to be pulled back to the smaller spirit. “What about it?”

“I want all of it,” the spirit said, finding a hint of silver re-enter the king’s eyes. “If you do.”

Hands found the bench either side of Jack’s hips, and the spirit kept a firm hold of the hem of Pitch’s shirt as the man rocked forward and murmured, “And?”

“I’m gonna win,” he swore, gasping just a little when one of Pitch’s hands splayed over his lower back. His face was close – and a promise, etched in the darkness of his eyes, had Jack’s head tilting, his voice begging, “So just give me a chance to.”

With a satisfied growl, Pitch’s mouth crashed into Jack’s just as the spirit arched up into the king’s touch.

And fuck, was it good. After so many weeks of _trying_ and _failing_ , the kiss felt as amazing as jumping headlong into a pile of snow. No, even _better_. Because it was _warm_ , Pitch’s skin and his body, the fingers digging into Jack’s spine, the tongue demanding entry into his mouth, it was all so warm and the heat alone had Jack growing weak.

Fingers touched Jack’s jaw, a thumb pressing against the corner of his mouth. Jack’s jaw dropped obligingly, obediently, and Pitch tilted his head back a little further so he could swoop in and absolutely obliterate Jack’s metal processes.

…but not all of them.

Without needing any verbal prompting, the fear began to rise, the sensation of choking, of worthlessness and suffocation and terror. Jack was pretty sure it was becoming a knee-jerk reaction at this point, and he hated the part of himself that was so attuned to his own poisonous thoughts that it thought this shit was normal. Was _okay_.

Jack’s eyes opened, and his gaze found two burning charcoal irises beginning to swirl with gold. Holding them, holding _out_ , he reached up to claw his fingers into Pitch’s shoulder, then up into the man’s ridiculous hair.

His lungs began to burn, pain etching its way onto his face, and Pitch let go of his mouth so he could move his tongue to the spirit’s neck, biting and sucking in some effort to recreate those marks that had long since faded over the last few weeks.

“ _Breathe_ ,” the king commanded, and Jack inhaled a hoarse breath.

_You make me sick._

“So do you,” he murmured, and when his breath stuttered painfully, Pitch’s forehead knocked into his, eyes glowing gold as he watched the air refuse to pass into Jack’s mouth.

_He might not be the same, Jack, but he’ll prove to you that he’s cut from the same evil cloth._

Contrary to his thought’s words, Pitch fingers brushed over Jack’s cheek, scalding the spirit’s icy skin with tenderness as warm breath passed over his lips. The spirit drew the air in, felt his throat unknot, and mentally whispered, _I’ll face that problem if he ever does._

_Fool_.

“Good?” Pitch asked when Jack was finally able to gulp in a lung full of air and let all of it out without choking.

The spirit nodded, just slightly because Pitch’s forehead was still resting against his. “Yeah.”

“Good,” the king murmured darkly, “now open up for me.”

A tiny moan escaped the spirit’s throat as Pitch pried his mouth open one more time, aggressively and slowly and filled with so much frustration that Jack would have grinned, just a little, if he wasn’t so utterly turned on.

_At least I wasn’t the only one being bitter about this whole thing_ , he thought as Pitch grumbled something low in his throat and shoved him almost painfully against the countertop. One of Jack’s hands clawed at the marble, desperately trying to get himself _onto_ the thing, while his other knotted in Pitch’s hair roughly. He yanked just a little when the edge of the stone bit into his lower back, and followed the snarling king’s mouth when he pulled back.

Their tongues slid together, hot and cold and so _wet_ it had Jack trembling with need. God, he was turning into a shaking _mess_ , and Pitch’s forceful coaxing, his mouth and his hands and his _determination_ , was making it so much worse.

Strong hands bit into his thighs, and he sighed in relief when the king manhandled him up onto the counter. Jack only had to surge forward to meet Pitch’s mouth, his neck and his sharp jawline, and the king’s fingers knotted in the ties around Jack’s pants and dragged their bodies together.

Heat and contact and beautiful, toe-curling friction had Jack groaning against the man’s throat, an answering growl vibrating through Pitch’s chest. He shuddered, mouth opening against the tendons in the king’s neck as he gave an experimental roll of his hips, just enough to drag his cock over Pitch’s and shudder out a low, involuntary noise. The king’s fingers bit painfully into the tops of Jack’s thighs as the spirit moved, heat and hardness and the heady taste of Pitch’s skin searing cold through his veins.

“Hah –,” the spirit panted when Pitch rocked back against him, his chest shaking just a little and the muscles in his shoulders tightening. He pried a hand off Jack’s leg and used it to crush the spirit against him so deliciously roughly. “I’m – hah, gonna fucking destroy those shelves in the stables.”

There was a rumble of agreement somewhere in Pitch’s throat that made Jack smile and meet Pitch’s tongue with his own when the man came back for his mouth. The king began to slowly grind into Jack, long, almost painful drags that were so _good_ and at the same time horribly not enough. Not to mention the king and his brute upper body strength had Jack more or less pinned against his body, so even when the spirit hooked his legs around Pitch’s hips and tried to _squirm_ , Pitch just bit at him and held him infuriatingly still as he _moved_.

With a groan, Jack wedged a hand between them so he could feel over Pitch’s body, so his fingers could graze over the muscles lining his torso and yank at the thin material of his shirt. Back arching, Jack brought himself just a little higher – high enough to run his mouth along Pitch’s jaw and murmur, “Your abs feel like heaven, but this is so much better.”

Pitch growled at him, dark eyes and a darker expression sending a shiver through the spirit’s body. “Who said you could talk.”

Jack licked his bottom lip and smirked when Pitch’s eyes immediately dropped to his tongue. “I’m serenading,” he teased, and the king’s eyes narrowed.

“You should be moaning,” he uttered, and like a son of a bitch, sank his teeth into the curve of Jack’s shoulder.

“God, Pitch,” he choked, shuddering as the pain and Pitch’s wet tongue and the _friction_ all _burned_.

But then the king abruptly stopped moving – stopped the gloriously sensuous and frustrating _contact_ – and shifted back from the spirit. With a panicking whine, Jack barely had a chance to grab at Pitch’s waist, his hips, _anywhere_ to stop him from leaving.

Pitch grunted when Jack pulled him back, and with firm hands prying Jack’s grip and his legs off him, Pitch murmured a low and husky, “ _Wait_ ,” against the spirit’s lips.

“ _What_?” he gasped as Pitch pulled away from him, untucked his shirt from his pants and went back to fucking drying the bowl he’d washed. Jack slid down off the counter, legs barely holding him. “Pitch you better be fucking –”

The kitchen door slammed open with an excessively violent _woosh_ , and Jack’s spine went absolutely rigid.

_Oh look, company_ , his thoughts mentioned dryly, and Jack suspected they would have been laughing if they weren’t so disgusted with him. _Just in time for the climax._

He turned wide eyes onto Pitch as people began filing into the kitchen, and a small part of him was relieved to find a murderously dark look on the man’s face. Storm-grey eyes flickered to Jack, then down at his staff on the ground. The spirit tried this best to calm his breathing and wobbled his way over to the thing before anyone could step on it.

Yves’s voice was loud, Skreek’s even louder, and the clattering of the dishes Phoenix and Tanton were carrying in was deafening. Jack’s heart, the dear thing, was shivering somewhere in his throat and Jack didn’t know whether he wanted to murder every last person in the room or run and hide like a spooked animal.

_I vote kill everyone._

“Running it is,” he ground out, and as soon as there was an opening, Jack ducked out the door and legged it.

The sky’s fake moon had yet to rise, and with the wolves having returned to the barracks for the night, outside was as dark as it was quiet. Jack was thankful for the peace, even if the darkness offered no real obstacle to werewolf eyes, because it gave the spirit some sort of illusion of isolation as he sank against his tree by the lake.

And proceeded to tear at the damn strings holding his pants together.

“Goddamn bastard – could have at least warned me – fucking boner the size of a mountain and he tells me to _wait_ –”

_I could help with that._

“Shut up you’ll make me soft.”

_That’s the point._

Ignoring them, because, blissfully, Jack’s acute level of frustration overpowered the influence of the thoughts for once, the spirit palmed himself through his pants and he worked the strings loose, his head knocking back against the tree as he wished, absently, for a warmer touch.

“That doesn’t look like waiting.”

The low, rough voice almost had Jack shivering. The spirit tilted his head and side-eyed the man leaning against the tree, watching Jack hungrily and without a hint of shame. Standing there, the two of them alone beneath that tree, Jack was exposed to all of the king’s dark glory, lean muscle and flashes of tattooed forearms as well as that devastating look in his eyes that made the spirit positively weak.

_God, I want him to touch me._

Trembling fingers finally found their way into a knot, and he yanked at the string to undo it. “I’m bad at waiting.”

Pitch’s chuckle sounded suspiciously like a low growl. “I can see that.” He grabbed Jack by the hem of his hoodie and reeled him in. “Did you think I would leave you like this, Jack?” he purred, long fingers dragging against the skin below Jack’s navel and then dipping lower, beneath the loosening waistband and brushing against the head of his cock.

The touch of another hand, of heat and skin against his sensitive flesh sent a shock of cold through Jack’s body. His fingers fumbled with the last of his ties as his hips bucked up into the touch, begging for more only for Pitch to move down and away. “I was really hoping you wouldn’t,” he choked out.

At the sight of Jack’s reaction, something terrifyingly satisfied crossed through the dark look on Pitch’s face. The man knocked Jack back against the tree with nothing but a threatening step forward and a hot hand splayed on the inside of Jack’s thigh.

The spirit’s skull smacked back into coarse bark as Pitch’s fingers wandered, as they grazed sensitive skin a mere inch away from were Jack wanted his hands, and then languidly dragged themselves over his hipbones and back down again. The touch left a trail of warmth that leached into Jack’s skin, and he was too far gone on the feeling of it all, on the way the warmth only made the ache in his ignored cock even worse, to bother feeling self-conscious when Pitch pulled his fingers through the last of the taut strings holding his pants around his waist and exposed him.

_He’s staring way too fucking much_ , Jack thought with a small huff. His eyes involuntarily slid shut as Pitch traced two fingers down his skin, the touch straying so close to where Jack wanted it that the spirit made a small, frustrated noise.

“A little higher this time,” Jack said, chewing at the beginnings of an irritated, playful grin. Pitch’s eyes flickered up to Jack’s face, deadly and intent and the spirit’s smile vanished altogether as Pitch’s palm dragged warm heat up Jack’s entire length.

“I may be courteous at times,” the king replied against Jack’s gasping lips, “but you are definitely not in charge here, frost spirit.”

Jack was too busy trying not to _die_ to truly feel threatened by the warning, but the low hum of Pitch’s barely-there anger was enough to send an obscene but shivering sensation down the inside of his thighs.

He rocked forward to grab at the king, to drag him down to Jack’s level and leave him just as desperate so he’d just let _up_ on whatever he thought this slow burn was. He even got as far as biting the side of the king’s jaw that wasn’t hurt before both of Pitch’s hands gripped Jack’s hips, and the spirit was given an acute reminder of the words the king had just spoken.

“Remind me,” Pitch said darkly, “what was it that you said to me earlier today?”

The spirit tensed. He was pretty sure he’d said a few unsavoury things while they’d been fighting, and for the life of him he couldn’t remember a single one of them. Not with Pitch’s hands on his skin – and especially not when the king was _looking_ at him like that. “I – uh…”

Something dark and evil glinted in Pitch’s eyes, and the king uttered, “I believe it was something to do with having you writhing in my lap.”

His eyes widened just a fraction, and Pitch’s grin was tangibly evil as he pulled Jack away from the tree. With the grace of a man who lived in shadows, Pitch settled himself on the ground against the trunk and held a hand out to the spirit just staring at down at him.

The invitation was accepted immediately, almost desperately, but when Jack went to throw a leg over Pitch’s, the king wrapped a strong arm around Jack’s waist and his back hit a solid wall of muscle.

Somewhere, in his mind, Jack resented the level of brain function Pitch must’ve still been harbouring. But then fingers were tracing up the spirit’s throat, over his Adam’s apple and under his chin. The lake was laid out before him, glowing under the presence of the fake moonlight and Jack dug his fingers into Pitch’s legs. He moved back against the king behind him, wanting for that friction again and hoping that, by the sound of the low exhale that escaped the man, Pitch was just a little greedy for it too.

Then the Nightmare King shifted. Boot-clad legs fell open just a little, forcing Jack’s to follow suit until a slight burn crept up the inside of his thighs. The spirit felt a sharp pull on his hair, exposing the length of his throat just as scorching heat returned to his cock and the king _finally_ started moving.

“Ah, fuck,” the spirit breathed as Pitch bit at the side of his neck, bruising and kissing while his hand moved with an infuriating level of languidness. His grip was tight, though, just on the right side of painful and so very skilled. Despite the pace, it drew Jack’s blood colder, his muscles tenser with every upward twist and overwhelming downward stroke. Practically trapped against the king, with one hand knotted in his hair and an erection pressing provokingly against Jack’s back, the spirit could feel the cold building, could feel the burning and his limbs twitch as Pitch’s slide grew wetter with every passing movement.

The spirit opened his eyes and made the mistake of catching an eyeful of himself, of Pitch’s hand disappearing into his pants and his own body aching to curl around the touch. Absurdly enough, like a strange thought washing up on a beach in a bottle, he noticed something odd about the angle Pitch was working at. Something – although not bad, but it was just –

“Are you – hah, _f-fuck_ , are you left handed? Or are you just really good at jerking off with that hand?”

Pitch’s chest shook, just a little, and Jack would have called it laughter if he wasn’t more worried about the fist pumping so devastatingly slowly around his dick. A tongue touched Jack’s ear, then teeth and a hummed, “I could be ambidextrous.”

Panting, Jack’s head fell back against Pitch’s shoulder. He could feel his orgasm already building, so achingly slowly that a half-coherent moan got stuck somewhere in his throat. “There’s gotta be a limit… to all your skills… so I’m d-drawing the line at t-that. Fuck, _Pitch_ , I’m gonna – let me turn so I can –”

But the king didn’t let him move, didn’t even quicken his pace. “Then come,” Pitch said slowly, almost casually. But even half lucid, hips rolling and fingertips numb, Jack could hear the growl in Pitch’s voice. There was nothing casual about the statement – the _command_ – and Jack wanted so badly to comply. But his legs were shaking and his head started turning, his heart contorting but _stuttering_.

A ragged breath punched out of Jack’s lungs. “I _can’t_ – _Pitch_ –”

He reached up blindly, entire body taut and near trembling as his fingers fumbled for dark hair. He pulled Pitch’s head down to him, twisting his entire body in the king’s lap so he could feel Pitch’s mouth.

It took barely a lick for Jack to come undone, his pleasure rocking through his body while Pitch kissed him wetly. His free hand came up to Jack’s throat to hold him in place, and Jack could do little more than make tiny broken noises in his throat as Pitch worked him until near-sensitivity.

Through his own hammering heartbeat and hazy mind, he could feel Pitch’s chest moving unevenly, the king’s hand straying down Jack’s throat while the other was presented to Jack, evidence of his own orgasm dribbling down Pitch’s palm.

Without needing to be told, the spirit leaned forward and ran his tongue over the mess, making a small, distracted sound at the taste of himself that had the muscles in Pitch’s arm growing taut. His tongue slid between Pitch’s fingers, laving, almost, at the length of them, before the king abruptly took Jack by the jaw and sank his own tongue deep into Jack’s mouth.

The spirit groaned, his head growing numb for an incredible moment. He barely had the sense of mind to pull away from Pitch enough to pant, “Let me,” as he twisted a hand behind him and ground his palm into Pitch’s crotch.

Pitch hissed, forehead knocking into the back of Jack’s head. The spirit awkwardly tried to manoeuvre himself around to reach the guy properly, pulling Pitch’s hands away from his skin – and mourning, with a shiver, the warmth of the touch – as he turned to face him.

Only to stop cold at what he saw.

The sight of Pitch sitting back against the tree, one leg bent while the other extended around Jack, would have been enough to make Jack’s heart stop on his strongest of days. Pitch’s chest rose and fell in uneven shudders, and his eyes had become impossibly dark, desire and shadows swirling to create a deadly invitation.

But the look on the king’s face as he caught Jack’s eyes was something beyond what Jack’s heart could handle.

_That isn’t hunger_ , he thought, exhaling a shaking breath of his own. _He looks…ravenous._

_He doesn’t look human_ , his thoughts belligerently spat. 

_Neither of us are human_ , Jack replied, eyes falling over the king only to notice patches of frost covering the sides of Pitch’s thighs, where Jack had been gripping for dear life. There was more in the guy’s hair, though Pitch didn’t look like he could give a single fuck in that moment.

And honestly, neither could Jack.

Eyes never leaving his, Pitch’s hand brushed against the spirit’s neck, and Jack only had to shiver for Pitch to drag him in and kiss him again, open mouthed and noticeably sloppier than his usual, controlled coaxing. Jack’s fingers brushed against the bulge in his pants, tentatively, at first, in case Pitch was going to be put off by how cold he was, and then firmer, moving in against Pitch as the king faltered.

Jack took over the kiss, trying for the slick, wet glide Pitch usually used to reduce him to a shivering mess. His hand traced down the king’s torso and slipped beneath his shirt, finding almost feverishly hot skin pulled taut over muscle. He tugged at the waistband blocking his path, and then at the fucking _buttons_ that lined his fly.

“You need to get different pants,” Jack murmured against the king’s mouth. He felt the faintest hint of a smirk before warm hands were replacing his and Jack was unceremoniously nudged back onto his ass.

The spirit was rewarded with the display of the Nightmare King singlehandedly undoing the buttons of his fly, the other wrist resting almost leisurely on his bent knee. Jack swallowed as he watched deft fingers work the pants open, but before he could move back in, Pitch said in a gravel-rough voice, “I don’t want your hands.”

The spirit flinched, curled back on himself a little. “If they’re too cold –”

Before Jack could even finish his self-conscious question, Pitch grabbed him by the front of his hoodie and hauled Jack into him so he could utter, “I want you to show me how well you can use your mouth.” Then he smirked, ever so darkly. “For things other than rambling.”

Relieved, Jack’s lip quirked at that, and he shifted forward just a little so he could lick at the corner of Pitch’s lips. “My mouth’s even colder than my hands,” he warned.

“Did I ever say I would mind?”

_No he hasn’t_ , Jack thought as his heart quivered, just a little. A small breath escaped the spirit, a cold one, and the darkness remained dangerously severe in Pitch’s gaze as he let the spirit go.

Hoping the king’s words weren’t just for show, Jack moved Pitch’s thighs further apart – payback, for the burn he could still feel in his own – earning a scowl from the king that had the spirit barely smirking, and settled between them. He was already half hard again, but more than ready to grind himself into the dirt if it meant he could taste Pitch, if he could test the king’s resolve against the cold and pull the threads from his hot skin until he unravelled as devastatingly as Jack had.

Rucking the shirt up the man’s torso – just enough that it was out of Jack’s way – he opened his mouth and planted a wet kiss below Pitch’s navel, tongue against skin in an obscene fusion of heat and cold. Pitch twitched, fractionally, and Jack grinned to himself as he worked his way to where Pitch’s cock was waiting, so hard it must have been physically painful, and so hot that when Jack’s fingers found their way up the shaft –

Pitch exhaled a broken breath, and without giving the man time to adjust, Jack followed the path of his fingers with his tongue. Pitch’s exhale turned into a something a lot deeper and a whole lot less restrained. His tongue laved over the head and his shoulders shook, just a little, at the salty taste of sweat and precum and the heady taste of _Pitch_.

_This is for me_ , he told himself as he felt the king’s hips jolt, heard another breath rattle from his lungs. _This is because of me. This is_ Pitch _and he’s –_

Curling fingers over Pitch’s hips, Jack pressed his tongue against the underside of Pitch’s cock and slowly, because the bastard needed a taste of his own medicine, swallowed him down as far as he could considering the awkwardness of the angle.

He wrapped his fingers around the base, felt the man twitch in his grasp, and couldn’t help the small noise that escaped his throat when Pitch touched the side of his head, sliding fingers carefully, with barely restrained strength, into his hair.

“Lovely,” the Nightmare King murmured.

The spirit shuddered under the compliment, his heart twisting with a pleasure that was as shocked as it was painful. It took him so far off guard that he had to pull away from Pitch to make sure he’d heard right. “What?” he croaked, staring at the king with wide eyes as he wiped the spit from his mouth with the back of his hand.

“I said you look lovely,” Pitch repeated with absolutely no sense of embarrassment. Of all things, flush rose up Jack’s neck at the compliment, an embarrassed cold that had the king’s dark eyes dancing. Then those eyes flickered lower, and the flush grew colder as the king stated mildly, “You’re also still hard.”

“Short refractory period,” he mumbled, and went to shove Pitch back against the tree so he could continue with his task. But Pitch’s fingers curled around his wrist before he could try, the touch slipping under the cuff of Jack’s hoodie and tracing the skin of the spirit’s forearm. Jack swallowed at the sensation, and when he looked questioningly at the king, he stilled at the sight of Pitch’s expression.

“What’s that smile for?”

Pitch merely arched a brow, eyes following the outline of the bones in Jack’s wrist as he asked, “What smile?”

Bemused, Jack shifted forward. Pitch’s eyes darted to him, and the spirit nosed the corner of the king’s mouth. “That evil fucking smile,” he said quietly. “What are you –”

Without warning, Pitch ground out some dark, intelligible curse and dragged the spirit into his lap. Before Jack could so much as get a word in, he fisted the spirit’s clothes and pushed them up his torso.

Jack pulled back in mild alarm, but then there was a hand on his ass drawing him in closer to the king, and Jack noticed, blearily, that Pitch was neither observing nor touching any inch of the skin he was putting on display.

“Hold this,” he told the spirit roughly, dark eyes with barely a glimmer of gold capturing his.

Jack just stared at him for a moment, trying to find a hint of something malicious anywhere on his face. When he couldn’t find anything except desire – and maybe, if he squinted, some kind of “bear with me” request – Jack took control of his hoodie and skivvy from Pitch.

_You wouldn’t find any evil intent on his face, idiot. It’s all hidden in his mind._

Anxiety fluttered in Jack’s chest for all of a moment before Pitch took Jack’s free hand and gave him his shirt to do the same, and Jack was shocked into near incoherency. He could _see_ curls of black running down Pitch’s chest out of the corner of his vision, but with his heart picking up a furious tempo, he kept his eyes locked on Pitch’s until darkness consumed the gold again. Until the sheer level of eye contact flat-lined his brain.

_Trust… he’s trusting me with this, he’s –_

The king pulled Jack in one more time and a moan fell from his lips.

Bare skin, slick heat and cold, slid together in an obscene glide and Jack realised, somewhere off in some functioning part of his mind, that Pitch had moved their clothes out of the way because he wasn’t going to last like this. Neither of them were, if the low, almost cut-off sounds Pitch was trying to swallow back were any indication.

The spirit moved in instinctively, pulling on Pitch’s shirt as he ached for the man’s mouth. But Pitch had a plan, apparently – a plan that involved tangling one hand up into Jack’s hair while the other wrapped, burning hot, around their lengths.

Jack could do little more than shiver as Pitch worked his fist around them, overwhelmed by the precum and saliva and the almost painful lines of tension cutting down Pitch’s forehead. The fingers in his hair tightened, but not painfully this time – just enough to hold Jack panting, less than an inch from the mouth he craved.

“Pitch,” Jack begged, voice broken and hoarse. “Pitch, please –”

The grip around their cocks constricted, and Jack’s eyes squeezed shut as his forehead fell against Pitch’s. Their mouths bumped together, an accidental touch, and Jack’s eyes fluttered open as Pitch bit into his neck, sinking teeth just under his jaw until Jack came with a hoarse cry and he felt Pitch shudder into his own powerful climax.

Pitch let go of Jack’s hair and the spirit slumped against the man’s shoulder, overwhelmed and out of breath and feeling thoroughly sated. A soft ache was slowly pulsing into life along the side of his neck, and the ache spread to his heart when he felt fingers, gentle, this time, run through his hair briefly, as if silently making sure Jack’s scalp was still in one piece.

Their breathing slowly quietened, and the two of them glanced at each other. This close, barely obscured by the darkness, Pitch looked… calm, almost. His stare was still as intent as ever, still as dark, but there in the quiet, his expression was almost… sad.

_You’re imagining shit, stop being so disgustingly sappy._

Jack’s eyes nearly rolled at the comment. Pitch sank back against the tree, and, tentatively, Jack glanced down. Somehow, their combined mess had ended up solely on Pitch, and the image of white splattered across Pitch’s abs would have made Jack hard again if his dick wasn’t definitely dead.

Letting his own clothes cover himself, Jack lowered himself onto shaking arms and, with a hand still bunching Pitch’s shirt and another ready and prepared to stop Pitch from shoving Jack off him, the spirit cleaned Pitch’s abdomen with the same long, careful strokes he’d used on the man’s hand earlier, grinning just a little when he felt the muscles twitch beneath his touch.

Then he grabbed the guy by the neck of his shirt and kissed him.

He felt Pitch smile into the kiss, probably at the nerve of a frost spirit who thought it was justified revenge to feed the taste of his own spunk back to him, and he held Jack by the side of his neck for a long moment.

When Jack finally broke away from him, the spirit fell back on the root-breached dirt, thoroughly happy for the first time in actual fucking weeks. He heard the sound of dark, low laughter, and glanced up to see Pitch watching him with an evil smirk similar to the one he’d been wearing before. The sound, and the expression, spread something almost warm through Jack’s chest and he had to clear his throat to ask, “What’s funny?”

“I’m going to enjoy this,” the Nightmare King said, and Jack honestly didn’t know if he should be utterly terrified or downright excited. Or even _relieved_ that after all this shit, Pitch miraculously still hadn’t grown sick of him.

_Pretty sure relief is winning by a landslide at the moment_ , he thought as he sat himself against one of the exposed roots of the tree. It wasn’t as good of a backrest as the trunk, but it felt safer than having his back to the lake.

“You said you don’t know how to deal with me.”

Jack glanced at Pitch and watched for a moment as his eyes began to return to their usual hue of silver with a dashing of gold. “I’m getting a little better at it,” the spirit replied. Then he remembered earlier that day, in Yves’s hallway, and grimaced. “Sometimes.”

“You deal with me by telling me what your problem is,” Pitch told him seriously. “If vocally doesn’t work, then I will accept frost. Or fists, since you seem to be able to throw them.”

Jack couldn't help but snort at the mental image. “Barely. You’d just kick my ass if I tried. I spy on you in the mornings, remember?”

“Frost, then.”

The notion seriously didn’t sit well with Jack, but this was an olive branch, wasn’t it? He couldn’t very well tell Pitch to piss off with it. “I thought you didn’t want frostbite,” he half joked, remembering the day in the forest when Pitch had gotten bitten by one of his Nightmares.

The king shrugged, the gold curling a ring around his pupils as he said, “If the context is right I might enjoy it.”

It took a moment for the comment to sink in, and another for Jack to cough on a surprised laugh. “Did you just –” The spirit’s eyes narrowed at the mask of amusement Pitch was wearing. “Your humour rears its head at weird times.”

Ignoring him, Pitch asked, “Are we clear?”

Jack licked his lips, and nodded his head reluctantly. “But, you know,” he laughed, “we could always just do this instead. Can’t fight if we’re too busy making out, right?”

_You know what that sounds like, right?_

Jack’s eyes widened, and he slapped his hand over his mouth. “No no, I – I didn’t mean –”

But there wasn’t a trace of anger on Pitch’s face. “I know what you mean,” he assured the spirit as he rose to his feet. He began redoing his pants as he stared down at Jack in the dirt and added, “And don’t tempt me.”

Jack grinned up at the man, but when Pitch began straightening his clothes in earnest, dusting ice out of his hair and off his pants, he pulled himself off the ground in mild panic. The gold in Pitch’s eyes brightened, and the king uttered a low, “Stay here,” to Jack.

Nodding – because “stay here” meant Pitch was coming back, right? Or was he just ordering Jack to stay outside so they didn’t awkwardly clash in the kitchen? But he didn’t seem to be disgusted with the spirit, but then of course why would it show on his face – Jack had barely opened his mouth to rasp some cheap retort when Pitch added, mildly, “I _am_ returning.”

Jack slumped back against his root as he gave the king a dirty look for reading his fears and looking so damn _smug_ about it. With a roll of his eyes, the king turned and in a few long strides, he disappeared into the darkness like the living night just swallowed him whole.

Fighting off a welling sense of loneliness, Jack began to pull together the strings for his trousers when he realised, with a groan, “Ugh, I never even got a look at his arm tattoos.”

But his thoughts – his _thoughts_ weren’t worried about Pitch’s tattoos. And he felt himself grow tense in annoyance as he heard their grating words ring through his head.

_Finally, now I can_ talk _._

 

* * *

 

As Pitch stalked back toward the main house, darkness that did not belong to him cascading around his form, a small handful of thoughts, biting into his skin like broken teeth, permeated Pitch’s clarity. The foremost, made only so by the familiarity of the rage it provoked, came with the knowledge that he now knew what the lotus fear represented.

Or, at least, an impression of _who_.

And no small part of him wanted to tear whoever it was into bloody pieces. He even had a new scythe to do it with. Smothering the rage, on the other hand, was the hard part. Because Jack’s past wasn’t any of his business, and as much as his bloodlust roared in protest, whoever the lotus represented had nothing to do with Pitch and his own wellbeing and his _focus_. It _couldn’t_ , otherwise he’d find himself digging through that fear for an image – probably sending Jack to his knees in terror, like he had that morning on Yves’s porch after Halloween, in the process – and hunting down whoever could leave such an imprint on a spirit who was so…

Pitch’s fists clenched tighter.

The next thought, a smaller yet no less jagged thought, wanted to draw blood because being _interrupted_ by the crazed bunch of villains in Yves’s kitchen had had Pitch so _close_ to homicide that it had shaken even the king. After all, he’d thought these murderous urges had _dulled_ in recent centuries.

_Definitely not dull in the least_ , he bitterly thought as he swept adjusting eyes around the group gathered in the kitchen.

The rest of the thoughts belonged to his hunger – his fevered, starving hunger, who wanted him to do nothing more than return outside and continue to ravish the spirit.

But he couldn’t – he had _things_ he needed to _do_.

Not to mention, there was something suspicious happening right in front of him.

And it wasn’t just the knowing look Pitch received from Yves – which was suspicious and annoying enough as it was.

The owner, understandably, was flying through the kitchen in an apron, the entire place polished to perfection save for an assortment of familiar paper bags sitting beside a pot on the counter. The kings exchanged a look over the paper bags, and Pitch nodded in mild gratitude as he began to break the bags open and arrange the herbs.

What was not quite as clear, though, was why Skreeklavic and Tanton were heckling the humanised Halloween King as he tried to clean.

“Are you sure you’ve never seen anything like them before?” Tanton asked.

Yves gave the wolf a sharp smile. “Ask me that again, Tantonius, and you will wake up without your tail.”

Skreeklavic whistled at the use of the wolf’s full name. Tanton narrowed his eyes at the king, and then at his own overlord. “What about Pitch?” he asked, pointing toward him.

The overlord of the werewolves gave Pitch an appraising look for a moment – one which Pitch returned with a semi-hostile glare. “How long will it be until you two are finished with the wolves?” Skreeklavic asked, a clear diversion from whatever the trio had been talking about.

Pitch shrugged, and then shared the shrug with Tanton. “By the end of the week,” Pitch answered.

“Yeah, we’re nearly done.”

There was a preoccupied look on Skreeklavic’s face as he nodded in understanding. “Keep those two spirits away from the wolves who haven’t been treated yet. The little ones Jack found,” he clarified when it was clear his words could have meant the scaries _or_ Jack and Phoenix.

The newfound concern had a sliver of suspicion crawling through Pitch. “North told you something.”

“Well, I didn’t just go there for the cake – mediocre cake, I promise you Yves,” he rushed to add when Yves crushed the wooden spoon he’d just pulled from the draw. Pitch rolled his eyes and the werewolf went on, “We bonded over our newfound similarities – except the Holomire chaos, since I obviously didn’t want my cake to be ruined by some surprise Imperial raid because those damn faeries have _ears_ on them, I tell ya – and North told me that the tall spirit was there the day his workers went berserk. First time any of the Guardians had ever seen it, Jack included.”

“He’s never mentioned that,” Pitch said with a frown, and Skreeklavic nodded again.

Tanton groaned and threw the pen he’d been holding onto the counter. “Shouldn’t we just kick them out of the realm in case they somehow cause this? I mean, they’re always lurking around the place, I wouldn’t be surprised if they were around the barracks today when…”

The wolf trailed off, and Pitch’s eyes narrowed when he remembered that yes, the weird little spirits had been around the cottage. In fact, they’d been standing outside of it doing _something_ to Jack. His eyes narrowed even further when he recalled that night of Halloween, and the fact that even if Tanton threw the spirits out, they could probably just get right back in again, regardless of whether they obtained Yves’s permission.

“We’re not throwing them out. I want to know what they are,” Skreeklavic said darkly. “But only once all the wolves are in the clear.”

Tanton grimaced, and tossed a look at Pitch. “You don’t have a clue, do you?”

Pitch shook his head as he went back to arranging the herbs on the counter. Yves filled the pot with some water and fired up his stove. “They don’t feel fear,” Pitch supplied, shredding some of the twigs and adding them to the growing pile of assorted foliage in front of him. “That’s all I can tell about them.”

He’d rolled his sleeves back down to his wrists on the journey back inside, and he was a little grateful for his own hindsight when Yves started helping him break up some of the herbs.

_Jury’s still out as to whether I actually trust him, and he’s too damn observant_ , Pitch mentally noted just as Yves turned to him with a concerned look.

“None at all?” Yves asked.

Pitch shook his head slowly, unnerved by the other king’s worry. There was no fear attached to it – none that Pitch could see, anyway – which only made the sight of it more unsettling. “None.”

_Speaking about unsettling_. Pitch flicked a look back at Skreeklavic and mentioned, “Jack’s seen it.”

Skreeklavic gave him a perplexed look, whereas it took Tanton all of two seconds to catch Pitch’s drift. “You mean the _monster_?” he balked.

The eyebrows of the werewolf overlord shot up at the sound of this, and even Yves paused in his sorting to give Pitch a steady look. “How do you know?”

Pitch pointedly ignored the look he was receiving and offered a vague, “We had a rough encounter a few weeks ago. I don’t know why I didn’t put two and two together earlier, but I was just reminded of it today when I went to collect this.” He gestured toward the herbs.

“We’ve been wading around in a smog of memory-killing steam for weeks,” Tanton reminded him.

“That shouldn’t matter,” he muttered to himself.

“Did you see anything of the monster that might give us a clue of what it is?” Skreeklavic asked, an undue dashing of hope in his expression.

Pitch shook his head, and the hope instantly died. “His memory of the Holomire forest is barely even there. Jack had no idea what the monster was, but he knew that he was terrified of it. I saw about as much of it as I usually do in the heads of the wolves.”

Skreeklavic made a loud, exasperated noise with his nose. “You know what? I’m going to hire a psychic.”

Pitch levelled a look at the werewolf as the other two males looked decidedly against the idea.

“Boss, I don’t think –,” Tanton began.

Skreeklavic smacked a fist into his palm. “Then we can hypnotise the boy into –”

Yves’s mouth turned down. “There is a reason he cannot remember.”

“We can find that out as well.”

Not for the first time, although not for a while now, it struck Pitch that maybe he’d given Skreeklavic a little too much credit in the compassion department. After all, Skreeklavic might have wanted Jack to live happily ever after so he could babysit the horde’s pups for the rest of his life, but he was also a villain. A villain who put his horde _first_.

_Is he willing to sacrifice Jack to do that?_

An inkling of pessimism crept up Pitch’s spine, and he couldn’t help but file away the possibility.

“What do ya think, Pitch?”

Pitch’s forehead creased. “I think hypnotism is a waste of time,” he said truthfully. “We’re clearly missing important information here, and considering what happens to people who remember the monster and what it did, I don’t think stirring Jack’s memories is a good idea. Not for now, at least.”

Tanton looked noticeably relieved at Pitch’s answer – after what had happened today in the barracks, Pitch couldn’t really blame the werewolf for dreading the idea of digging up more unsettled memories. Yves collected up a handful of their broken herbs to throw into the boiling water with a little hum of agreement.

Skreeklavic sighed loudly. “Fine. You’re right, you’re right. I just want to know what it _wants_.”

“Then shouldn’t we be looking at the common denominators here?” Tanton suggested.

“Jack and Phoenix,” Yves agreed.

The overlord tapped a thoughtful finger against his mouth. “You think it wants revenge for not killing them in the forest?”

Tanton shrugged. “It makes sense, doesn’t it? It chose to attack the workers at the North Pole and leave them as sleeper agents because that’s where Jack’s been spending most of his time. Then it does the same to the wolves to catch Phoenix out. The two might have survived their way through a bunch of tribal faeries, but if the monster times it right, then just imagine Jack alone against an entire Workshop of creatures – reindeer fucking included, and he’s told me how scary they are – and Phoenix against a fortress of werewolves he is emotionally incapable of defending himself against. That sounds like a good revenge plan to me.”

_I should hire him as my secretary when I regain my power_ , Pitch thought with a small, approving nod.

Skreeklavic looked like he was having some sort of emotional indigestion. He didn’t refute Tanton’s theory – none of them did, because although it was not exactly perfect, it sounded like a damn good starting point – so he just coughed and managed, “So we just keep them here, then. And if it’s after Jack and Phoenix, it’ll eventually rock up.”

“And then what?”

Everyone looked at Pitch, and the Nightmare King gathered by the collective silence that this was going to be a dangerously impromptu adventure.

“It’ll be simple to keep Jack around,” Tanton diverted, clearing his throat, “but Phoenix?”

“Invite his partner over,” Yves suggested as he brought the boiling herbs off the water and acquired some strange straining device from one of his cupboards. Pitch watched as he filtered the dark water before tipping the liquid back into the pot and setting it over the heat once again.

_Does he even realise what he just said?_ Pitch thought as he tried to figure out what Yves was playing at. _He met the faerie that night in the tavern, surely –_

“I thought you hated new people in your realm,” Skreeklavic teased with a leer.

Yves simply shot the werewolf a look, and then cast a knowing glance onto Pitch as he said, “I can learn to make temporary exceptions.”

_Oh yes, he knows_ , Pitch thought with more than a flicker of malicious amusement.

“What are you smiling for Pitch?”

Pitch didn’t even bother smoothing down the expression, and when he looked at Yves, he saw a mirroring smirk lace the man’s face as he stirred milk into the pot. “No reason,” he told Tanton, who simply raised a confused eyebrow at the Nightmare King.

“Pitch, would you do me the favour of getting the chocolate from my fridge.” In the middle of retying the bags of herbs, Pitch gave Yves a dry look. It took the humanised Halloween King a distracted moment of swatting Skreeklavic away from the stove with his spoon to add, “The chocolate is in a clear jar, dark brown and broken into small pieces.” With a scowl, the Nightmare King cracked open Yves’s fridge, and his eyebrows levelled out into a line of pure annoyance when he saw a clearly labelled jar sitting right in front of him.

“What on earth are you two cooking up?” Tanton asked as Pitch handed the jar over to Yves with a thinly disguised glare. Pitch just glanced at the werewolf as he went back to retying the bags, and Tanton shifted his gaze from Pitch to his overlord. “I’m not blind, it’s for Jack isn’t it? He’s been acting off for weeks, and Phoenix won’t shut up about it.”

Skreeklavic made a pained face at Pitch – as if the overlord was some subordinate getting grilled by his superior, not the other way around – and Pitch sighed. He’d told the man weeks ago that too many people knowing about this would do more harm than good, and Skreeklavic had kept his word, at least, by not saying anything.

_But the creatures in this realm are observant_ , he thought. _And hopefully also a little more helpful in their advice than whatever Yves is concocting over there._

“Fine,” Pitch said, and Skreeklavic all but grabbed Tanton by the other man’s t-shirt and explained the situation to the wolf quickly and lowly and with altogether too many hand gestures.

“ _Seriously_?” Tanton gaped, eyes wide as he took in the information. Skreeklavic finally let him go, and the wolf slumped against the counter, elbows on the marble as he scrubbed his hands over his face. “Fuck that sucks so much.”

“Ya know,” Skreeklavic said, tossing a serious glance at Pitch, “in hindsight, it probably would’ve been a better idea to have sent someone else to fetch me today. Sure he got in the door alright, but I’ve got some wolves who know their way around a stick of dynamite, and they would’ve done just as good of a job.”

The small dosing of hindsight had a wary lash of irritated confusion rising within the king. “I would have thought being in the presence of the Guardians would’ve improved the situation.”

Skreeklavic just laughed at that – a laugh that held no trace of humour. “I’ve never seen the lad cry before, Pitch. And I don’t want to see it again.”

_And just when he starts dropping off my Somewhat-Trustworthy Assholes list, he goes and says something like that_ , Pitch thought as he rubbed the bridge of his nose. “It’s unsettling his emotions, so once we fix it –”

“With this?” Tanton asked as he sceptically pointed toward the paper bags.

Pitch pinned him with a dark look. “You don’t think it’ll work?”

Tanton took a bundle of the bags and read the labels scrawled across them (labels Yves had written, Pitch assumed). “Humans have medication for this sort of thing,” he said quietly. “Drugs that alter chemicals in the brain. And sometimes that doesn’t even work. You think _herbs_ will?”

Yves plucked the bags out of Tanton’s grip and then threw the lot of them into a cupboard, shutting the door behind him with his foot. “These are not herbs that will work on humans,” he explained as he pulled a mug from a shelf and poured the drink he’d created into it. “They are especially designed for beings with magical properties, so we will give them a try for now.”

The cup slid toward Pitch, and the Nightmare King stared down at the steaming, dark liquid.

“Hot chocolate,” Yves offered as he immediately began to wash the pot clean.

Pitch eyed the man at the sink for a moment, wondering, absently, how it was that Yves seemed to find some sort of solace in the mundane, fastidious housework he did. Pitch’s one and only attempt at washing a bowl had left him with nothing but wet hands and a mind free to run in any direction he wished.

_I think I’ll just stick with training_ , he thought as he collected up the mug and headed for the door. _The physical exertion and Yanov running at me with a war cry keeps my brain occupied enough._

“And thanks for today, Pitch.”

The Nightmare King stiffened at the sound of Skreeklavic’s gratitude, and he flickered an incredulous look back at the wolf. “I knocked your wolves out with nightmare gas.”

Skreeklavic just shrugged, and Tanton grinned between his fingers as the overlord said, “Saved ‘em from themselves, I heard. So thank you.”

Pitch shook his head, swallowing down the revolting feeling the words conjured. “There is no need,” he muttered, and stalked out of the house before Yves could see right through him.

Outside in the darkness, Pitch found the spirit where he’d left him, looking particularly exhausted and filled with much more anxiety than Pitch had left him with. The Nightmare King’s hunger growled in displeasure when he saw that the spirit’s skin was no longer flushed, the lust gone from his eyes and his clothes returned to some presentable state once again.

_Looks like that small victory is over_ , Pitch thought unhappily.

He held out the cup to the spirit, and Jack jumped in fright when he realised he wasn’t alone. “Holy _shit_ Pitch.”

Barely suppressing his smugness – because giving the spirit a start was, truly, one of his daily highlights – he wiggled the mug and ordered, “Drink.”

Jack blinked at him in confusion. “What? Pitch, just because you –”

“Drink,” the king pushed, and Jack had little choice but to accept the scalding cup. “Cool it down however much you need, and drink.”

Jack was silent as Pitch sat himself back down against the tree, shifting uncomfortably against the bark. Eventually, the spirit turned the mug around in his hands, beginning to cool the porcelain, and mumbled, “Why would he put anything in here?”

Pitch’s eyes snapped to the spirit’s face, to the almost vacant way he was staring into the swirling mixture. But then Jack seemed to snap himself out of whatever he was thinking, and looked at Pitch with wide eyes. “No, I didn’t –”

“It’s just hot chocolate,” he lied, tone earnest and calm. Jack relaxed a bit against the root he was propped up by and Pitch added, “Yves made it.”

The spirit nosed the rim of the mug. “It’s hot.”

“Ice it.”

And he did, blowing a puff of freezing air into the liquid that seemed to gather up the steam skimming the surface and carrying it off into the night. The spirit took a tentative sip of the drink, and promptly screwed up his face. “It’s bitter.”

Not that Pitch knew anything about what all this earthly rubbish was meant to taste like. His dry offer of praise for that bread he’d eaten earlier had really been for show more than anything else – and he suspected Yves had noticed as much, what with that irritating smirk he’d been wearing.

Then, quietly, almost a whisper, the spirit said, “But it tastes like the stuff my family used to make.”

The king tensed. The words were choked with melancholy, and Pitch was transported back, for a moment, to that night of Halloween when Jack had been talking about the fire spirit and his books.

He tilted his head back against the tree, passing his eyes from the spirit out onto the fake light reflecting off the lake before that melancholy could quite touch him. In its place, he wondered, vaguely, if the chocolate tasted similar because Yves was just very good at masking the taste of strange herbs, or because Jack’s life as a human had been sprinkled with strange plants.

“Thanks,” the spirit added.

Before Pitch could even think, an easy, “It’s fine,” slipped from his mouth into the dark space between them.

 

* * *

 

Pitch didn’t stay for long, and Jack was left with the cooling chocolate until he’d drained the cup, knowing, if it was made my Yves, that the king would behead him if he didn’t finish all of it.

Even if the thoughts’ mental commentary didn’t make the task exactly easy.

_Do your insides feel like mush yet? I bet the heat melted them into a tar as thick and slimy as your personality._

The descriptions had gotten more vivid for every mouthful Jack swallowed, until the spirit had ended up downing the remains in the cup and holding his fist over his mouth to keep it down. But he was a fighter, and determined not to waste whatever offer the drink had been. And so, a finger hooked in the handle of the mug and the rest wrapped around his staff, Jack lit the wood up and stumbled back toward the house, too busy trying not to throw up the chocolate to worry about the tiny monsters living out in Yves’s field for once.

The door to the kitchen was slightly ajar, and just as Jack reached it, two familiar bundles of white came streaking out of the house.

“Hey,” he croaked as Mo and Io ran laps around his feet, weaving in and out of his legs, “what are you doing in here?”

But without even acknowledging the question – which Mo was usually _good_ at, damn it – the scaries scurried across the lawns and into the darkness, where Jack suspected the crows they usually played with were waiting.

“Strange,” he muttered as he stepped into the house.

The kitchen space was immaculate as always – except, Jack quickly noticed, a cupboard left slightly open. Casting a glance back out in the direction the scaries had run off in, Jack absently left the cup on the counter as he made his way over toward it.

Nudging the door open with his staff, Jack sat on the kitchen floor and stared at a small clump of wrapped paper bags, all the same size and twined together with crimson string.

A shaking hand, unguided by anything as innocent as curiosity, pulled the bundle by the string until the mass landed in his lap. He saw labels on all the bags, words he could barely read but which felt oddly familiar. He dug through his mind as he tried to organise the sounds in the names, sounds that became increasingly familiar the more he deciphered.

Yves glided back into the kitchen, and he stopped short – abruptly, so – when he saw Jack on the floor by the open cupboard.

“I’ve heard these words before,” Jack mumbled.

_Where?_

“I don’t know, I can’t –”

Before he could finish the sentence, a memory washed through him along with the sensation of freefalling in mid-air. He remembered a swirling vortex of light and chaos and Tooth yelling at him a bunch of herbs meant to –

He dropped the bags, hands beginning to shake as the thoughts in his head fell terrifyingly quiet.

“Oh no,” he choked.

“Bony Jack.”

Yves’s voice was stern – not hard, not like he was angry at Jack, but like he wanted Jack’s full attention right this instant and he was going to burn down the house if Jack didn’t give it to him.

_Then let them burn,_ his thoughts breathed.

Jack’s breathing shallowed as he tried, frantically, to shove all the bags back into the cupboard. Into the cupboard and out of his sight because if he couldn’t see them then he couldn’t think about them, if he just didn’t think – _I shouldn’t have touched the cupboard, I shouldn’t have touched them – why was the thing even_ open _, oh god –_

“ _Jack_.”

“Give me more,” he whispered, barely able to look up at Yves.

Yves was frowning, an unhappy curl at his lip as he uttered, “Jack, get off the floor –”

“GIVE ME MORE!” he screamed, and he fell back against the cupboards as he felt his own body convulse in panic.

_They KNOW don’t they._

It wasn’t a question, but Jack still shook his head all the same, breathing out a desperate, “No, no _no_ ,” as he held onto his head.

_You can’t LIE TO ME when there’s a bag of fucking BRAIN HEALING STICKS IN FRONT OF US._

“They’re not blind! They’re not blind – they _see_ things. What did you _expect_?”

_I expect the filth you surround yourself with to treat you the way you deserve._

Jack’s fingers dug into his skin. “They’re not filth –”

“Frost?”

Hot, burning hands touched the spirit’s shoulders, and Jack didn’t even have time to scream before he was being crushed against a chest that was as suffocating as it was safe. Jack clawed at the arms pressed against his face, felt the body flinch when he accidently drew ice along his skin, and felt his name being said over and over, trying to anchor him, trying to bring calm.

But there was nothing left to anchor. The waters were dragging at him, pulling him with so much force that his muscles were giving out, his whole body weak. He pressed his face into a scalding throat, hurting both the spirits, and cried, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry I didn’t mean any of it I’m sorry –”

“I know,” Phoenix murmured, swallowing against Jack’s ear, “I know – shh, just breathe.”

But Jack couldn’t breathe, so he began to cry, deep, panicking, aching sobs that tore from his chest and were barely muffled against Phoenix’s burning skin.

And the fire spirit just held him through it, both headless of the three deadly powers watching on with a terrifying mix of concern laced with sheer, murderous resolve.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Firstly, I am super sorry that I haven't updated in months, and I hope the sheer volume of this update makes up for it. And also the smut, because come on.  
> Secondly, thank you for all your comments and kudos and being patient with me! We're getting places with this plot, I'm super excited.


	24. A Quarreling Cold (Part I)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Jack has to deal with one of his more dire defense mechanisms, and everyone else has to deal with Jack.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy New Year everyone!
> 
> (and oh my god i'm sorry this update took so long)
> 
> Part I

“KICK HIM IN THE BALLS!”

For the rest of the night, Jack had stayed with Phoenix.

With burning hands and words softer than a dying light, the fire spirit had given Jack little other choice than to tuck himself up in Phoenix’s room and share a pillow with the guy, even when their combined body temperatures made the proximity nearly unbearable. Tears had turned into panic and then into quiet, until eventually all the spirits were left with was the condensation created by their breaths and the strangely extravagant song of the piano in the attic. Phoenix hadn’t said a word as he’d let Jack just share the space with him, and never once complained when physical contact only brought pain to them both.

“WHAT THE SHIT WAS THAT? DO YOU EVEN KNOW WHERE A SET OF TESTICLES _ARE_?!”

The music-riddled calm had lasted until dawn, when rustling and low voices had disturbed them both and Jack had spoken for the first time since his choked apologies on the kitchen floor – a hoarse, quiet request to go watch, to which Phoenix had groaned some sort of inquisitive noise, and Jack had told him about Yanov and Pitch’s regular morning meet-ups.

Predictably, Phoenix had literally _leapt_ out of bed, as if Jack had promised him front-row tickets to a pit fight, and pulled on a pair of pants as they’d both stumbled out of the house in Pitch’s wake.

“UGH, YOU’RE A GODDAMN _WEREWOLF_ , YANOV! GET OFF THE GROUND AND BITE HIM OR SOMETHING!”

Jack was lucky – he knew that. After spending weeks avoiding him for the sake of both of their feelings, Phoenix could forget what didn’t matter so fucking quickly. There wasn’t even any room for forgiveness. It was just erased, and replaced by the easy, rough relationship they’d always had.

But Jack also wasn’t an idiot. He knew what Phoenix was doing – what the downright _clinginess_ the fire spirit was currently exuding meant. And as much as Jack wanted to reassure him that he could safely leave Jack alone without the frost spirit crumbling again, he didn’t know how much of the reassurance would be the truth.

“FUCKING CHRIST YANOV, I _BETTED_ ON YOUR ASS. I CAN’T BELIEVE IT. I CAN’T BELIEVE _YOU_! WHAT HAPPENED TO YOUR _FUCKING_ _WEREWOLF_ _REFLEXES_ , _HUH_?!”

He didn’t know anything anymore. The thoughts had been deceptively silent since Jack had broken down the night before, and the spirit still didn’t know if it was because of the herbs he was pretty sure that hot chocolate had been spiked with, or because the thoughts were so angry they had moved beyond outright aggression.

The fear of the latter – the fear that the thoughts were just _sitting_ there, listening, watching, waiting – had reduced the spirit to a trembling mess, overwhelmed with the need to just _scream_ at them, countless times already. He just wanted to _get_ them to _say_ _something_ , to _do_ _something_ , to do _anything_ to stop this _tension_ he could feel drawing tightly around and through his brain, through his entire body.

If this was some sort of passive strategy of theirs to fuck with Jack, it was working.

A hot elbow nudged Jack in the ribs, and Phoenix started up a slow, mocking clap that the frost spirit joined in on just to see the look of absolute _hatred_ spread across Yanov’s face. “When you said I was gonna get to see Yanov eat dirt, I didn’t think you meant literally.”

Sitting beside the fire spirit on the wooden fence bordering the sparring grounds, Jack tried to curl his mouth into a half smirk, tried to hold it there as long as Phoenix had his eyes on him, but the expression warped and fell before it could really do much good.

“It was a guess, I didn’t know if he’d actually come this morning,” Jack admitted as his eyes traced over the two figures in the midst of trying to bury each other’s faces in the dusty ring.

Phoenix blinked at the frost spirit, and Jack felt a track-pant covered knee knock into his. “I barged in on Tanton takin’ a piss yesterday and he told me that Olivia and the others were healing really well. Total memory wipe too, thank fuck.”

“I figured,” Jack mumbled as Pitch swung a leg around the back of Yanov’s neck and drove the other man’s face into the ground. “Yanov would still be by Olivia’s bedside if she wasn’t okay.”

With an agreeing hum, Phoenix cupped his hands around his mouth one last time and yelled, “LOOOOOSSSSEEERRRRRRRR,” only proving that Jack really couldn’t take the guy anywhere without causing a scene.

From where the werewolf was lying in a pile of his own sweat and dirt, Yanov achingly rolled onto his back so he could raise his arms wide in a _What the Fuck_ gesture at Pitch. “Who invited them?” he growled, and to the audible delight of Phoenix, had to actually spit out some grit caught in his mouth.

Pitch shook his head as he rolled his shoulders back, as if the whole situation was so hopeless he wasn’t even going to bother commenting on it, and offered Yanov a hand to get out of his own dusty defeat.

Just as Phoenix began sniggering to himself, a pair of wolf whistles, sharp and synchronized, cut through the soft dawn air. The rickety fence Jack and Phoenix were sitting on was shaken so violently the two had to grab hold of the structure for their dear lives to avoid getting thrown off.

“Look at you Yanov, keeping Pitch all to yourself,” Xani, geared up in sweatpants and some man-killing gloves, sneered.

“We wanna have a crack at him too,” Clyde, shirtless and adjusting the tape around his knuckles, added with a feral smile.

The Nightmare King gave both newcomers a flat, tense look, and with the new shift in his focus, a forgotten Yanov literally slid out of Pitch’s hand and fell back onto the loose dirt with a curse.

“Holy shit, holy shit,” Phoenix whispered as Xani and Clyde vaulted over the waist-high fence and started cracking joints in a show of aggression. The fire spirit was slapping Jack like some teenage boy about to get let into a strip joint for the first time in his life, and Jack tried his best to let that excitement break through the ice he could feel freezing his skin, to feel it somewhere in his cold veins and ward off the chilly numbness inching through his blood and over his skin like a parasite.

He could feel the cold’s shadow curling over him, dragging the energy, the passion, from his brittle veins. It made the everlasting anxiety fade, if only a little.

It also rendered the world so very, very quiet.

Void of panic.

Void of pain.

Gritting his teeth, Jack buried his face in his hands, digging the heels of his palms into his eye sockets.

The cold was safe, it was familiar. But it took away everything – the panic, the hurt, but also the warmth, the laughter, the happiness. The _colours_.

_I don’t need you yet_ , he told himself, told the numbing cold. _It’s not that bad. I can deal with this. It took so long to relearn even the simplest of facial expressions after the last time you came, I’m too tired to do all that again._

“Double or nothing,” the fire spirit said, forcing Jack to look at him.

_Breathe_. “On who?” the frost spirit croaked.

Four eyes strayed back to the two werewolves circling the man dressed in black in the middle of the ring. “Xani’s gonna pummel him,” Phoenix announced with a vicious grin. “Hands down.” As Yanov groaned in the dirt and Clyde bitched about not getting Phoenix’s support, Xani raised a thumb at the two spirits sitting on the fence line. “You still got your goods on dark and gloomy?”

Jack leaned forward on his staff as his eyes found Pitch’s figure again, standing so very still under the hungry scrutiny of two werewolves.

_If I let that cold back in, I won’t be able to feel his warmth again, either_. “Yeah,” the spirit eventually murmured. “Pitch’ll win.”

As if he’d heard Jack, silver eyes danced toward the frost spirit and lingered for barely a count, before the man returned his gaze to the wolves in front of him. Dropping a foot behind him, he fell into a half-crouch as he waited for Xani and Clyde to come for him.

It reminded Jack a little of the way Yves had moved when he’d absolutely annihilated a portion of the horde on his front lawn weeks ago. Leaning back on his precarious seat, he added, “Oh yeah, they’re fucked.”

Phoenix glanced at him questioningly, and turned just in time to catch Xani and Clyde charge at Pitch. “You’re talking big for a – _son of a_ –!”

The fire spirit nearly jumped off the fence as Clyde was thrown, bodily, through the air and landed on his ass behind the Nightmare King. Jack grabbed hold of Phoenix’s t-shirt in case the guy actually tried his hand at some divine intervention as Xani lunged at Pitch from the side, and the king performed some inhuman step sequence before he introduced his boot to the wolf’s shoulder blades and slammed her into the dirt.

“What the fuck,” the fire spirit whispered, eyes wide in horror as Pitch narrowly spun in time to deliver a shockingly accurate elbow to Clyde’s throat when the guy returned for seconds. Beneath Pitch’s foot, Xani twisted her entire body and clipped the king in the back of the legs with her feet, tossing Pitch on his ass and managing to land a good punch on his jaw before Pitch literally buried the sole of his boot in her abdomen and flipped her over his head and onto her back in the dirt.

Jack winced as a coughing Clyde and seriously angry Xani pulled themselves out of the sand only to be reintroduced to the loose ground a few minutes later.

If it was any consolation – which by the looks of the bruises the wolves were gonna be sporting, it probably wasn’t – at least their opponent wasn’t a complete monster. Like a respectable living thing, Pitch was starting to properly pant – in a dignified way, of course – and he was working his freshly-punched jaw in quite obvious pain as a sheen of sweat blistered over his exposed skin.

The rest of him, though, was so highly attuned to the fight that maybe he _was_ a monster after all. His shoulders were rising and falling as he tracked the determined movements of Xani and Clyde with terrifying levels of calculation. His entire body would respond to even the slightest muscle-twinges of the wolves, and his eyes traced everything from their feet to their gazes and then down to Yanov when the werewolf heaved himself out of his pool of defeat to join in on the fight.

“Wow gee, what do we have here?”

Neither Jack nor Phoenix turned to greet Skreek as the overlord came sidling up to the fence they were sitting on – and luckily too, otherwise they would have missed the heel of Pitch’s boot shoving Yanov’s forehead back into the dirt and the wolf getting promptly snarled at by a battle-enraged Nightmare King.

_Oh god, why is that so hot?_ Jack mentally moaned as he pressed his forehead into the hook of his staff.

A cold, quiet moment later, filled with nothing but the hurling grunts and curses of the savages in the ring, Jack squeezed his eyes shut as the urge to scream at his uncharacteristically unobtrusive thoughts started to bubble again.

_You’re not even going to object to perving on Pitch?_ he bit at them. _You always do, even when we’re pumped half full of Nod venom. If you can still hear me then just stop pretending like –_

“Dog fight,” Phoenix told Skreek, and Jack cracked his eyes open to notice the sneer on the fire spirit’s face. “And your army’s getting their asses kicked.”

_He says it like he hasn’t been passionately rooting for them all morning,_ Jack thought with an eye-roll.

The leader of the mentioned army, dressed that morning in a matching set of pants, waistcoat, and bowtie in the most awful hue of mustard Jack had ever seen, merely huffed a chuckle at the news and yelled, “Slaughter ‘em Pitch!”

The cry was met with three downright betrayed exclamations of, “ _Boss!_ ” and a signature dry look from the king now at the centre of a very indignant circle of werewolves.

“That’ll get ‘em moving,” Skreek chuckled under his breath, and Phoenix snickered to himself entirely too gleefully as Yanov back-rolled onto his feet and Pitch had to beat off three angry, dirt covered wolves.

But it only took a few minutes of watching the sheer carnage unfold for Skreek and Phoenix’s amusement to wane sharply. “I never knew the bloke was so strong,” Skreek murmured, peering at Pitch when the king grabbed hold of the arms of the werewolf on his back and flung Xani over his head like a malfunctioning cape. Phoenix made a rude noise in grudging agreement.

Jack glanced at Skreek, noting the only semi-impressed state of the man’s eyebrows, and rolled an answer over his tongue that he knew he shouldn’t say aloud – that Pitch had probably always been this strong, but he’d just never had to utilise the physical strength back when his shadows were still operational.

_Back when he could teleport without falling into a wall in agony_ , Jack thought, biting his lip.

“Brat,” Skreek suddenly said, snapping at Phoenix with his fingers until he got Phoenix’s annoyed attention, “before I forget, Yves – quite blandly mind you, but I don’t doubt that he’s pleased – mentioned that the recording of the piano for the banshee should be finished by now.”

_Well that explains why the music had been so impressive last night,_ Jack thought mildly.

It took Phoenix a moment to dig himself out of his own irritation and process the point of Skreek’s announcement, but when he finally did, the fire spirit’s entire face lit up and he almost fell back over the fence in excitement.

“Fucking finally,” he exclaimed, clambering over the rickety structure, “Frost you stay here I’ll be back in a minute. Don’t wander off.”

Jack just rolled his eyes again – what did Phoenix take him for, a toddler? – as the fire spirit dashed back through the barracks and toward, Jack assumed, Yves’s house.

Phoenix had ticked off for barely a minute before Jack felt an odd silence settle between himself and the werewolf shifting uncomfortably from foot to foot off to his right. The frost spirit glanced at Skreek curiously, catching sight of the man’s favourite mug in his hand (which read _“#1 Boss_ ”, a gift from Yanov that had resulted in forty subsequent years of non-stop teasing from Phoenix) before his eyes travelled up and finally noticed that the werewolf was side-eyeing him like he had something he wanted to say.

_Fuck, is he gonna bring up last night?_ he wondered, sagging a little. _I guess crying in front of the guy twice in one day would probably make him a little worried, so I shouldn’t be that surprised_.

Sighing, Jack began a weak, “Last –” just as Skreek opened his mouth and asked, “You doin’ okay, boy?”

Even though the spirit was prepared for the question, the frankly _innocent_ question, he went very still at the sound of the genuine concern in the words, at the sound of the worry he could hear so clearly. He went still because Skreek’s voice managed to reach right down Jack’s throat, bypassing his heart and lungs, and curl a fist around the spirit’s gut and _squeeze_.

And with a jolt, the spirit realised, _Fuck he knows_.

Shit. _Shit_. The thoughts knew that Yves knew – right? They’d gotten so angry last night, so _incorrigibly_ angry, that there was literally no point in trying to convince them of anything else even if what they believed was a lie.

But were there others who knew? Had Yves given Jack those herbs out of his own intuition or had –

Jack mentally kicked the train of thought off its tracks and buried his face in his hands. _Fuck, I can’t think about this until the thoughts are properly gone again. Until I’m_ sure _they’re gone._

“Jack boy?”

The fist around Jack’s gut began to knead, to mould the organ into something less than natural, something barely tangible but vividly raw. Something a lot like a solid, jagged chunk of dread, only with more embellishments, more finishing touches – like wrapping paper made of acidic, slimy betrayal, string made of stress, an elaborate knot job pulled taut by tension, and a neat little bow tied by shame itself.

Jack huffed a small, tired laugh at the visual, and coughed to clear his throat. “I’ll be okay,” he hedged, and considered ignoring Phoenix’s warning and fucking legging it.

But then a hand was shoving at Jack’s knee, and the spirit peeled his face out of his hands to see the Nightmare King looming over him. Behind him, his three foes were slumped in a pile in the middle of the dusty ring, but judging by the angrily twitching limbs, Jack didn’t think they would be down for long.

His eyes strafed back to the king, and he took a satisfied moment to take in how fucking filthy Pitch looked covered head to toe in dust.

“You’re sitting on my towel,” Pitch grumbled at him, eyes flickering for a moment between the spirit and Skreek.

_He’s observant, even when he’s getting the shit beaten out of him by three werewolves._

“Am I?” Jack replied, not quite feeling charitable enough to move.

“Move over,” the king ordered flatly, and the small, carefully wrapped parcel burning a cold hole in Jack’s gut shifted.

Vengefully.

Without the slightest shred of humour, the spirit said, “I’ll give it to you if you kiss me.”

Pitch raised an incredulous eyebrow, and this time when his eyes flickered to Skreek (who was staring off into the distance pretending not to be an eavesdropping bastard), Jack had to smirk at the coward.

When the king glanced back at the spirit, his eyebrow dropped at the sight of the curl of Jack’s mouth, and before Jack could even _think_ about whether he wanted to be a dick about this or not, Pitch moved so quickly, so _gracefully_ , that within a heartbeat he was so close that Jack nearly tipped back off the fence. His smirk was wiped right off his mouth, and Skreek didn’t even have enough time to turn and gawk at the two of them before Pitch’s mouth touched Jack’s ear and the king was murmuring, “Kindly allow me to scrape off this dirt, and I’ll do more than that.”

His nose brushed across Jack’s cheek as he retreated, and despite the resentment Jack could feel sitting like a rock in his internals, a shiver still stole across his flesh at the mere sensation of the man’s touch. It was enough of a distraction for Pitch to yank his towel out from under Jack’s thigh, enough of a distraction for the spirit to unthinkingly let a small, self-depreciating laugh fall from his lips.

_Incredible. Even when I’m angry at him all I wanna do is fucking touch him_ , he mentally groaned.

Attempting to ignore the nosy stare coming from his right, Jack glanced up and caught Pitch trying to wipe the accumulation of dust and sweat off his face and neck. Silently, he followed the king’s fingers with his eyes, tracing the guy’s barely-bruising jaw before dropping past the nearly healed scratches from yesterday and down to his throat. And then… and then to the curious images of _horses_ on Pitch’s exposed forearms.

“What?” the king grunted, almost defensively.

Jack’s eyes rose. “You missed a bit.”

“Where?”

“Come ‘ere and I’ll show ya.”

But this time, Pitch didn’t move a muscle toward the frost spirit. His eyes narrowed, picking up on something potentially dangerous with his too-keen gaze, and Jack met that calculating stare head on with an icy look of his own.

“Oi! Stop flirting you freaks.”

Pitch rolled his eyes over Jack’s shoulder and sent a glare darker than any kind of void toward the returning fire spirit. Jack exhaled a curse, and when Pitch’s eyes flickered back to him, he avoided the contact completely by turning and glancing over his shoulder.

In his chest, a small bundle of tension, so tightly wound and already half devoured by the numbing cold, mercifully collapsed at the sight of the approaching fire spirit and the tiny girl he was carrying.

The fire spirit grinned. “Look who finally got let out of the attic.”

The newly freed Lani sat high in Phoenix’s arms, glancing around in interest, and Jack felt beyond happy to see her getting some fresh air. She was still in the same dress they’d found her in – a dress she liked enough to vehemently object to any other suggestion made by Phoenix, the wolves, or even Yves with a well-placed catalogue – but her hair, at least, had long stopped being a tangled mess. As soon as Hex and a few of the other wolves had been introduced to Lani, they’d scrounged up a brush and some scissors and neatened up the matted locks under Phoenix’s strict supervision – and then proceeded to fuss over the little banshee whenever Phoenix wasn’t around the place.

Today her long, dark hair hung over her shoulder and down to Phoenix’s knee in an elaborate braid that swept it all out of her little face – and also happened to accentuate the overly large headphones sitting over her ears, connected to a cord that seemed to disappear into a pocket in her dress.

_Did she always have pockets in that thing?_ Jack thought to himself.

After a detailed survey of her surroundings and the unruly people occupying it, Lani’s dark eyes lit up when she noticed Jack sitting on the fence, and she looked at Phoenix and pointed forcefully at the frost spirit.

Phoenix rolled his eyes and an involuntary grin touched Jack’s face as the two joined him. “Yeah, yeah, I know you like him.”

Ignoring the sigh the felt emanate from Pitch, Jack hooked his staff over the fence and held his arms out for the banshee, collecting the tiny thing and all her hair up when Phoenix passed her over. Apparently no longer being stuck in a snow-covered village full of murderers had reduced Lani’s disinclination to be touched by Jack and his colder-than-natural skin, which had done a decent service to Jack’s self-worth.

With a hand on Jack’s shoulder and another in his hair, Lani stood on Jack’s thighs as she cooed down at the frost spirit holding her, earning another smile just as Jack’s eyes travelled down and he noticed that there was, in fact, a new pocket sewn into Lani’s pale blue dress.

And it was in the shape of a tiny, orange pumpkin.

Jack’s eyes widened at the sight of it, and as Lani smoothed over the new patch protecting her music recorder with a happy little smile, Phoenix laughed and belted, “I swear, Yves would have gotten away with it if he wasn’t such a pumpkin freak,” as he hefted himself over the fence.

Jack’s eyes flickered to Phoenix, to the sight of the guy fussing over a wrinkle in Lani’s dress – the idiot hadn’t even thrown his other leg over the fence yet and he was already mothering, like he wasn’t even _conscious_ of it – and he mentioned, “You’ve gotta stop swearing.”

Phoenix’s eyes narrowed. “Give me some credit. She can’t actually hear me – that’s the only downside to these noise-cancelling headphones.”

The frost spirit grimaced as Lani wiggled herself into a seated position on his lap, making sure to keep his staff well away from her in case she got burned. “They seem to be working pretty well. She doesn’t look like she’s on the verge of screaming again.”

Phoenix nodded in agreement. “Yeah, hopefully it stays that way.”

Apparently feeling left out of the homely scene the spirits and Lani were creating, Skreek threw a chirpy, “Ya know what banshees are good at?” over at them from his exiled place on Phoenix’s other side.

Jack pointedly kept his eyes on the girl in his lap (and off both the overlord who knew too much, and the king who was now leaning against the wobbly fence as he tipped sand out of his boots) as Phoenix said, “Uhh, letting you know when there’re dead bastards lurkin’ around the place?”

A brief memory of an unfortunately familiar pair of dead bastards flashed through Jack’s mind, and the spirit made a face. “If Urie and Grey weren’t so creepy, Lani could’ve screamed the pair of them back into whatever afterlife they’re hiding from.”

As Lani’s nose wrinkled in response to Jack’s grimace, Phoenix groaned angrily. “I fucking hate them so much, Lani ain’t going anywhere near those pricks.”

On Phoenix’s other side, Skreek pouted like a child, and turned to Clyde when the werewolf dragged himself over to the fence-turned-glorified-grandstand. “Am I being ignored, Clyde?”

“Think ya are, boss,” Clyde wheezed.

“What, Skreek?” Phoenix sighed, humouring the old man. “What are banshees good at?”

The werewolf puffed back up at the sound of the response, and happily said, “Making desserts!” which earned him a dry look from everyone in the vicinity. “No joke, some of the best dessert chefs I’ve met have happened to be banshees – except Yves, obviously. He’s great even without the banshee genes.” The overlord glanced over his shoulder nervously, and Jack snorted a laugh.

Phoenix, on the other hand, was beginning to scowl suspiciously at the werewolf. “Seriously?”

“Of course,” Skreek nodded solemnly, and then paused for a dramatic moment before he added, “They’re especially known for their ice- _scream_ recipes.”

A moment of silence rolled through the sparring ring, and Jack was quietly and fervently glad that Lani was essentially deaf to the rubbish that spouted from Skreek’s big mouth. Everyone else – judging by the unimpressed looks Xani and Yanov had on their faces, Clyde’s swift stagger out of Skreek’s vicinity, Pitch’s classic _What did I do to deserve this?_ expression, and the complete shutdown of Phoenix’s Skreek-facing senses – probably wished they had a similar level of protection.

Since it was sometimes preferable to just pretend Skreek had never actually spoken than to acknowledge the bullshit he said, Phoenix turned to Jack with a suddenly thoughtful look on his face and asked, “On second thoughts, do you think it’d work?”

As Skreek’s eyebrows began to rise in shock over being so blatantly ignored, the frost spirit shrugged. “I don’t see why not.”

“We’d have to blindfold her or something, though,” the fire spirit mused as, in the sparring ring, Xani and Yanov, the former barely on her feet while she struggled to help the latter to his, turned their backs on their leader like they’d finally given up on him. “Those fucking twins would give her nightmares.”

“We’d need some earplugs for ourselves as well,” Jack added as Skreek reached after a scurrying Clyde, only for the fence to impede his desperate grab for support. Empty-handed and shunned, the werewolf overlord slumped over the fence in defeat, coffee sloshing out of his cup. “The insulated kind.”

Rubbing his fingers over his face in contemplation, Phoenix nodded in agreement as he began to mentally flesh out the idea of flushing Urie and Grey out of their lives for good.

“Yo! Pitch! You ready for round two?” Clyde hooted, slapping Pitch on the arm rather weakly when he finally reached the king.

Pitch looked downright offended at the question, and gave Clyde a critical once-over. “Are _you_?”

“’Course. ’Could take down a mountain… a sm’ll mountain. Ugh, let’s go already before I pass out. Fuck.” Only after the curse had left his mouth did Clyde notice the tiny addition to the audience members, and his eyes widened at the sight of her. “Oh, shit, hey there Lani,” he added, booping the banshee on the nose with a dusty finger. She giggled at him happily, and with the renewed energy of a man given strength from an angelic being, Clyde turned and hobbled his way back toward where Yanov was now trying to help a collapsed Xani to her feet.

“Savage,” Phoenix muttered, plotting apparently forgotten in his rush to clean Lani’s face before Clyde infected her or something. But before he could, the fire spirit froze when he realised where Lani’s eyes had travelled to.

The very act of the king moving must have caught the banshee’s attention, and mid-towel throw, Pitch was engaged in another staring contest – and to be honest, he looked like he was seriously struggling not to run away from this one.

_I thought he didn’t like children_ , Jack thought, a little confused. _But that’s not hatred in his eyes. It’s more like…_

Gold flickered into Pitch’s irises, and with an annoyed sigh, the king cast a withering look over Jack’s head at Phoenix.

It took Jack barely a moment to figure out why. And as soon as he did, his seething resentment temporarily packed itself away – probably for the same, pathetic reason Jack still wanted to kiss Pitch as much as he wanted to punch the guy in the face.

He spun on his companion and drove an elbow into Phoenix’s arm. “Hey, dickhead, he _helped_ us rescue her,” Jack muttered.

“I can’t fucking help it,” the fire spirit gritted out, flicking an irritated look between Jack and Pitch.

“Turn your motherly instincts down a notch.”

The comment, though, only made Phoenix’s irritation hone in on Jack. “Shut the fuck up, I ain’t taking shit from a guy who looks like he’s been mauled.”

Jack recoiled from the asshole, and Phoenix licked his lips a tad maliciously. All fucking night, the fire spirit had barely offered the marks on Jack’s neck anything more than a disapproving scowl, and _now_ he decided to mention them? In front of four werewolves with super hearing and the perpetrator of the marks himself?!

What a dick.

_Speaking of werewolves with super hearing_ , Jack thought, glaring at and around Phoenix when he felt Skreek’s keen and scrutinizing gaze curve around the fire spirit and jab Jack straight in the neck.

Readjusting Lani (who was busy playing with the drawstrings of Jack’s hoodie) on his lap, the spirit began hunching his shoulders, and before he could be remotely sensible and stop himself, he glanced up at Pitch for… he didn’t even _know_ what for. A reaction? Help? Some _mockery_?

But he found none of the above waiting for him.

The Nightmare King was staring at the collection of bruises on Jack’s skin… as if he was _satisfied_ by the sight of them.

It caught Jack so completely off guard, because shouldn’t the Nightmare King and his enormous pride be snarling something cruel to save his own reputation? Should he be – literally and figuratively – throwing Jack to the wolves and stalking back to his own problem-trio in the ring?

Pitch’s eyes met his briefly, the barest flicker, and Jack had to swallow as a terrible, irrational need began to tug at him – began to tug him toward Pitch like some hopeless idiot who threw away resentment and anger just for the sake of a warm touch.

_This is a good sign though, right?_ he asked himself, a touch dazed as his gaze dropped from Pitch’s eyes to his mouth, then down his dust-smeared throat. _If the cold was doing its job, I wouldn’t be feeling this desire. It’s good. Fucking annoying and it hurts like shit, but I want to touch him again and actually feel it. Yeah, so it’s good. Fuck, I know I’m mad but WHY is he just_ right there _and not –_

Needless to say, the spirit was too deep inside his own head to hear the next comment thrown over his head by Phoenix, too deep to see the way Pitch’s expression darkened, or to sense the way the Nightmare King forcibly shoved the growl out of his voice so he could utter in a deceptively bored tone, “Who was it that I found wrapped around a faerie in the woods yesterday?”

With a jolt, Jack looked up at him in confusion – because yesterday he had quite _clearly_ been too busy getting necked by a certain king to be doing the nasty with a faerie in some shrubbery – when he saw the direction of the Nightmare King’s less-than-friendly gaze.

His head snapped to the fire spirit, and Jack’s eyes widened when he caught sight of the violently dark blush blooming across Phoenix’s cheeks and the tips of his ears.

_Did… did Pitch and his enormous ego just defend my honour?_ Jack thought in mild shock. His heart gave a little squeeze in reply, and for a moment he was so devastatingly glad that his thoughts either couldn’t or wouldn’t ruin this for him for once.

_No, if I get too used to this silence, they’ll be able to catch me with my guard down. But… but it’s just so fucking nice to be able to appreciate the charming parts of Pitch without vile commentary._

The fire spirit began grumbling something rude about voyeuristic kings, and after taking a moment to shove his own mental problems into a temporary backseat so he could have a _functional_ _conversation_ , Jack glanced at the spirit and said, “The _woods_ , Phoenix? _Really_?”

Phoenix’s eyes narrowed, and the sneer the guy painted on his face that was, endearingly enough, utterly hindered by the cute blush he was sporting.

“Isn’t that a bit too close to nature for you?” Jack added, a smirk serrating his words, and Skreek, somewhere in the background, began wailing to himself about the waning virtue of his children. The werewolf’s unnecessarily dramatic arm movements caught Lani’s attention, the bizarreness of the monologue caught Pitch’s, and Jack watched out of the corner of his eye as the banshee and king stared Skreek down with varying degrees of confusion (vague, in Lani’s case, and bordering on disgusted in Pitch’s).

“Thought I’d try it out,” the fire spirit snarked at Jack. “See what a hobo like you seems to like about it so much.”

Jack snorted. “Better than Douchebag Ville?”

“No fucking way. Swear to god I got splinters in my ass, I ain’t ever doing that shit again.”

Pitch made a revolted noise, clearly losing patience with absolutely everyone loitering around the fence, and finally threw his towel over the creaking wood, preferring to stalk back toward the resurrected circle of death in the ring than listen to Phoenix and Skreek for another single second.

Lani turned and watched Pitch go with a curious gaze, one hand still wrapped around Jack’s hoodie ties, and Jack tugged on the strings to gain her attention again.

_I feel ya_ , he thought quietly as Lani glanced up at him. _He’s a dick, but I want to follow him too._

Phoenix, the asshole, was snickering at Pitch’s expense, but a touch of that blush was still there, a dark hue of garnet against his tanned skin. Probably to try and hide some of his embarrassment, he rudely wrestled Lani back from Jack while the two of them were in the middle of their silent pining, and the banshee made a displeased noise.

“Is this still that guy from the tavern?”

The fire spirit gave Jack a sidelong look as he tried to convince Lani to sit properly. “Yeah, Dom. Nice guy. For the love of god Lani, why don’t you wanna sit with me? What’s so good about an ice cube like him?”

“Technically I’m colder than an ice cube.”

“MY POINT EXACTLY!” Phoenix screeched as Lani shoved him in the face with a tiny hand and went to crawl back over to Jack.

With a victorious smirk, Jack moved to collect her when Lani sent the frost spirit a very stern look and proceeded to pull on Jack’s knee, attempting to drag it toward Phoenix’s.

“Ah,” Phoenix said, “I think she wants us to be united as parents.”

Jack grimaced – first down at the banshee, then over at the fire spirit. “I don’t wanna be united with you.”

“Too bad, honeybunch. Duty calls.”

And without even being able to get an elbow in to defend himself, Phoenix threw an arm around Jack’s waist and pulled the frost spirit in until their thighs were flush. The pair almost fell off the fence in the process, but after some cursing and rearranging, Lani was eventually able to sit contently on one each of the spirits’ legs.

“Your leg’s burning through my pants,” Jack grumbled as he threw Phoenix’s arm off him.

Phoenix stuck his tongue out at him. “Well yours is burning mine too so just be quiet. And hey what’s that - ah, the fuck? How did you get dirt on your face?”

The fire spirit reached across and grabbed Jack’s poor face before the frost spirit could object, licking a thumb and proceeding to rub at the cheek Pitch’s nose had brushed against earlier. Jack would have slapped the guy if he could, but alas, with Lani sitting on one of his legs and having to maintain a screwed centre of gravity to keep everyone from falling off the fence, Jack had to take the mothering with an icy glare.

“Don’t move or I’ll lick you,” Phoenix threatened as he proceeded to wipe spit across Jack’s face.

“You already are,” he grunted, trying to bite at the hand burning his face. When Phoenix didn’t let up, Jack’s eyes flickered past the spirit’s ear and spied a forlorn werewolf pouting into his coffee mug.

_I guess I shouldn’t be an asshole to him when he genuinely meant well_ , Jack thought as Phoenix’s scorching hot saliva hit a particularly tender spot and goddamn _hurt_. “Skreek,” he exclaimed, “ _help_ me!”

The werewolf sniffed, and glanced balefully over at Jack. “Why should I when you two don’t even laugh at my jokes?” the overlord mumbled, sipping dejectedly at his coffee.

“ _Skreek_.”

The werewolf huffed a sigh. “Oh, fine. Oi, fire brat, you should invite your ex-Imperial sweetheart ‘round for Yves’s food.”

Successfully heckled, Phoenix choked. “ _Why_?” he coughed.

Skreek gestured to Phoenix with his coffee cup, throwing more liquid over the fence. “So we can meet the bloke! Sus him out, make sure his irritating Imperial tendencies have been well and truly kicked to the curb.”

“ _Otherwise he will be_ ,” was the unspoken threat, visible only in Skreek’s evil smile. Jack couldn’t help but roll his eyes when he noticed, and finally managed to bat a distracted Phoenix away from him and resettle himself and Lani comfortably again. He wiped at his face with his sleeve as Phoenix jabbed a finger toward Skreek.

“ _Ex_ being the key word here,” Phoenix snapped. “And how do you even know that? Did Frost tell you? Yo, Frost, did you –”

“It was Yves,” Skreek interjected. “Which hurt me more than words can say, young Phoenix, to hear of your blooming love not from you but from –”

“What?!” Phoenix squawked, setting fire to whatever sentimental bullshit Skreek was about to unfurl. “He wasn’t even in the room when Dom told me!”

“I still don’t get _why_ he told you,” Jack muttered.

Phoenix kicked at him. “Maybe I’m just a trustworthy person.”

As Skreek snorted himself into a spluttering laugh, earning an angry tirade of curses from the fire spirit, Jack felt a shred of unease curl around his knuckles.

_“You’ve always trusted me, Frost.”_

A whisper of hurt, of pain and silence, blew across his skin, reminding Jack of the unspoken truth the two spirits shared – a truth Phoenix had yet to offer up to Jack.

_Is it because you don’t trust me?_ Jack asked silently as he watched Phoenix’s fiery fringe rustle as he yelled at Skreek. _Is it because the whole story is a lie? If it hurts, Phoenix, the way you made it look in Yves’s lounge that day, then why won’t you tell me? I was meant the be there_ with you _, so why –_

Like paint dripping into water, curling and spreading, warping and melding, an image began to form in Jack’s head, tainted with a feeling the spirit didn’t want to name. In the twist of those the colours, the expanse of the water, the contortion of both, he grabbed the fire spirit’s head and threw him onto the sweat-covered ground. Ice curled up his wrists and he shoved his staff into Phoenix’s throat so he could _scream_ at him until the fire spirit told him the secret he’d had to hear second-hand – no, _third_ -hand – from _Pitch_.

So he could scream until Phoenix knew how much it had hurt to be sent out of Yves’s lounge that day like he needed to be protected, ears muffled like some _child_.

So he could scream until this unspoken secret Jack was holding like a bomb was destroyed, until the static in his head died, until encroaching cold vanished and his voice was shredded and everything… just went away.

A shiver passed through Jack’s spine, a nervous one, and he blinked once, twice, and the violent, terrible fantasy dissolved.

_I’ve gotta tell him I know, sooner or later_ , he thought, running his fingers through his fringe. _Probably sooner, before the thoughts are back in action and take everything from me again. Or I get confused between reality and the shit in my head and actually pin him to the ground like a lunatic._

Another shiver curled up Jack’s nape, and the fingers in his fringe gripped tightly onto his hair. Yesterday… the thoughts had said that the memories weren’t his – whatever the fuck _that_ meant – but they had been adamant over it, angry even. So were they even going to _let_ him say anything to Phoenix? Were they going to stay quite like they had been all night, or was this all just a test, just a handful of hours of taunting and when Jack finally gets a chance to say something they’ll come back with the pain or the _gold_ –

Jack twitched when Lani poked him in the cheek in concern, and he forced a smile onto his face so he wouldn’t worry her.

“I keep trying,” Phoenix grumbled at Skreek, “but he’s got excuses galore for not wanting to meet you guys. It’s shitting me up the wall, honestly. I mean, I just wanna hang out with him here, ya know? That’s not weird is it?”

The instant Jack picked up on the shred of vulnerability in Phoenix’s voice, a stab of old, raw pain cut straight through the spirit’s chest. It had been a hundred and fifty years since Jack had actually seen Phoenix get serious about anyone, and the last century and a half of flings that never even got a named mention in his Halloween stories proved as much.

_I guess Phoenix really likes this guy_ , Jack thought to himself, and if he was maybe a little unsettled over the idea, he swept the feeling away for now. _But if he keeps brushing Phoenix off, he’s as good as dead._

A very similar promise was inscribed in the dark look slathered over Skreek’s face. The werewolf slammed his cup onto the rickety fence, splashing coffee over his hand, and with a low growl said, “Tell him your old man ain’t letting ya get married without meeting the bloke first, then bring him here and we’ll roast him up for dinner.”

Halfway through readjusting the headphones on Lani’s head (all the while being swatted away because Phoenix was apparently blocking Lani’s view of the three lunatic werewolves doing some kind of ritualistic war dance around a glaring Pitch), Phoenix paused. “Don’t you mean roast him up _some_ dinner?”

Skreek’s eyebrows became one long line of discontentment. “Do I?” he challenged, slurping at his coffee.

As Jack was torn between wondering what the fuck the wolves were trying summon with their dancing, and being amazed that Skreek even had any coffee left to slurp at with the way he’d been throwing his cup around, Phoenix groaned. “Don’t go giving me those eyebrows of judgement. I’m trying here, it’s not my fault if he just wants to be fuck buddies or something. And don’t even think about lecturing me about my lacking virtue, werewolf. Save that shit for Frost. He’s probably had more one night stands than me, what with all that _charm_.” Phoenix sneered the last part at the frost spirit, but when Jack just stared the fucker down, the fire spirit had to squint at him for a moment, suddenly unsure about himself. “Probably,” he conceded after a thoughtful moment.

Jack raised one finger at Phoenix – his middle finger, to be precise – over Lani’s head so she couldn’t see, and Phoenix playfully snapped at it.

“Do you actually want to meet him Skreek, or are you just wonderin’ what an ex-Imperial tastes like?” Phoenix asked as Lani’s head tilted back curiously. Jack easily opened the palm of his hand so a small snowflake could flutter down onto the banshee’s nose. “’Cause if it’s the second option, I can tell ya right here and now.”

Jack covered Lani’s headphones and gave Phoenix a scandalised look. “ _Gross_ , dude.”

The fire spirit rolled his eyes, and Skreek huffed a sigh and said, “Just bring him here, will ya? Yves even said he wouldn’t mind having another skin and bones addition to the dinner table if you like the fella.”

Skreek’s words seemed to punch Phoenix’s retaliation switch even harder than usual, and with a curse the fire spirit scrubbed a hand over his face. Jack bit the inside of his cheek, worrying it, as he watched Phoenix’s expression shift from amicably pissed off to absolutely done.

“I said I’d fucking try, okay?” the fire spirit snapped at Skreek. “Jesus, it’s too early for this shit.” Jack gathered Lani closer as Phoenix rolled back off the fence, and as soon as Phoenix was on stable ground, he scooped Lani up into his arms and used her as a living shield to defend himself from Skreek’s stare. “Get your ass moving, Frost.”

Jack twitched at the command, and he looked between the fire spirit and Pitch, who was still very clearly engaged in a fight that was getting dirtier by the minute. “But –”

“Do I look like I’m talking with question marks, here?”

The frost spirit squinted at Phoenix, standing on the cobblestones with a small child in one arm and his spare hand on his fucking hip, an eyebrow cocked as if the words that’d just come out of his mouth had made perfect sense. Skreek rolled his eyes and propped his head on his hand. “I’ll just become a one-man cheering squad, then.”

Jack snorted quietly, and Skreek hollered a mighty, “Go get ‘em Pitch!”, to speed up the death brawl happening in the dust in front of them. The spirit shoved his staff into the cobbles and threw his legs back over the fence. Upon hearing an outraged snarl tear from the throats of Xani, Clyde, and Yanov, he glanced behind him just in time to see Pitch curse as he had to roll out of the way of a combined, claws-out attack.

Phoenix began to snicker again, holding Lani close as he told her a load of rubbish about the king trying seriously hard not to get murdered by three werewolves. The pair began to wander off toward Yves’s house, and with a small glance behind him, Jack followed after them, pointedly ignoring the unsettling way Skreek was watching them as they left.

Bodily, Jack trailed obediently behind Phoenix as the spirits and Lani trekked across Yves’s landscape. His mind, however, had long since tuned out the anti-Pitch rant Phoenix was engaged in, and had wandered off into the trees, wondering where on earth Io and Mo had gotten to. It had been hours since he’d last seen either of them, and usually the two scaries were clinger than an overprotective Phoenix, so he was starting to worry a little.

In the middle of Yves’s dead fields, not three feet from one of the more suspiciously larger pumpkin houses, Phoenix stopped abruptly, and Jack walked right into the guy’s back.

“Whoa, why’re we –”

Phoenix spun on him, Lani in his arms and a determined expression on his face, and Jack’s throat went dry very quickly.

“Talk to me about what’s going on with you,” the fire spirit demanded, hitching Lani higher on his hip as he stared Jack down. “I can deal with your mood swings – and my fucking god you have a lot of them – but this is fucking ridiculous. You know I haven’t seen you cry in two hundred years, right? Do you even realise how much last night freaked me out?”

Oh no. He wasn’t ready for this. He seriously wasn’t mentally prepared for this. “Uh, Phoenix –”

“You’ve had enough time to calm down and now I’m not letting you get out of this again. We’re having this fucking talk and so help me –”

Jack’s skin itched as his flight response started to kick in. “Phoenix –”

“Why won’t you _tell me_?”

The spirit froze at the sound of the desperation in Phoenix’s voice, and an aching shard of guilt twitched in Jack’s torso.

Words touched his tongue – not an answer, nothing close to an answer, just words he wished he could offer as an explanation. Words he wished Phoenix would take as one.

But he knew the fire spirit would only scream at him if he tried.

Honest, beseeching words like, _I can’t tell you because I’m afraid of saying anything when they’re still here. When I can still feel the static, when they’ve told me so many times to keep my mouth shut and they’ve done so many things to keep it shut. I don’t want them to get so angry that they make me hurt someone. That you start looking at me like I’m even capable of hurting someone._

He remembered lashing out at Clyde a few weeks ago, and had to swallow the nausea that worked its way up his throat.

“Frost.” Jack looked up at Phoenix, saw earnestness in the fire spirit’s expression, and had to look away again. “Don’t do that to me, man.” Jack felt the air around him grow a little warmer, saw Phoenix’s unlaced boots enter his field of vision. “It’s you and me, Frost. I’ve got you, I’ll do fucking anything for you. I’ll listen to anything that comes out of your mouth. You _know_ that.”

Jack’s heart squeezed painfully, guiltily. The words should have been reassuring, but he was still afraid of things Phoenix wouldn’t be able to stop even with the kindest of intentions.

He was tired. Tired of the giant walls he had in his mind to stop himself from thinking things he couldn’t while the thoughts were listening. Tired of maintaining them, tired of trying to keep the poison inside of him from escaping.

The cold crackled, somewhere near his heart, waiting to be of use. Waiting to _numb_.

Jack just wished he was strong enough to say no to it as sternly as he should have.

_I want to see him_ , Jack thought, eyes flickering up to Phoenix’s waiting face. _I don’t care if he broke his promise, he just needs to remind me why I don’t need this cold. I’ll deal with Phoenix later. I’ll deal with everything else later. Right now I just need to stop this numbness._

“Doesn’t the same apply for me?” Jack finally murmured. Phoenix blinked at him, confused, and Jack cleared his throat and uttered a little louder, “Or is my trust not worth as much as yours?”

The fire spirit’s eyes grew wide, and before Jack could stop himself, could stop _it_ , acid flooded in and scorched through his throat. “Why won’t _you_ tell _me_?”

Jack had all of a moment to take in the wide-eyed fear on Phoenix’s face before his entire expression shut down and the fire spirit laughed a humourless, angry chuckle that had even had the essentially deaf Lani glancing at him warily. “Ha, yeah nah, I ain’t doing this shit in front of Lani. You still wanna pick a fight? Go do it with someone fucking else.”

The instant Phoenix turned his back to the spirit, regret speared through Jack. He should have said something different. Something _else_. But…being a dick was the only way to get Phoenix to back off, the only way Jack could _think_ of, and the spirit was at the end of his rope already, he couldn’t _deal_ with any more tension.

Phoenix spun back on him after a few steps, and Jack stiffened when the fire spirit added, “And if you decide to have another mental fucking breakdown, I’ll be inside having tea with Lani.”

As the fire spirit walked away for good this time, Jack heaved a hoarse sigh and turned back the way he’d come. He scratched shaking fingers over his skin as he stumbled over dirt and past pumpkins, trying to pry off the cold he could feel forming.

_Get off get off get_ off _._

It took him a while to realise that there was no physical ice he could crack off.

 

The sparring was over by the time Jack returned to the barracks. Skreek and Yanov were the only two left in the ring, discussing something too low for Jack to hear from the fence line. Both looked up when Jack called out to them, and before he could even ask, the wolves pointed toward a nearby cottage before turning back to their conversation.

“Am I really that predictable?” Jack muttered as he turned and spied an unused cottage with the door ajar.

The cottages left unfilled by the wolves were usually empty save for some upturned furniture and an occasional crate filled with objects Yves would never disclose the exact nature of. The cottage Jack nudged his way into was no exception to this – and if it wasn’t for the sound of running water and the pile of dusty clothes discarded by the bathroom door, Jack would have turned and walked right back out again purely because of how lonely the place felt.

Thankfully, it didn’t take long for Pitch to finish his efficiently short shower. Jack had just sat his ass on a broken bedframe when the king emerged from the bathroom, hair slicked back in that disconcerting fashion and body clad in a fresh set of clothes. The Nightmare King seemed to be unsurprised to see Jack waiting for him, and took the frost spirit in with a brief sweep of his eyes as he picked his dirty clothes off the floor and threw them over the broken piece of furniture Jack was perched on.

“Got all that dirt off yet?” the spirit asked.

Pitch’s eyes narrowed a little, and without offering Jack a single word, he dragged the spirit off the bedframe with commanding hands, tossing the staff onto his pile of clothes with a deft nudge of his boot, and shoving at Jack’s waist until the spirit’s back hit a stone wall.

Obediently and willingly, Jack head tipped back as Pitch crowded him, body radiating enough heat from his shower that Jack could almost imagine his own skin melting. He inhaled as heated lips and a tongue pressed into the pulse in his throat, and when damp hair drew across Jack’s cheek, the spirit buried his fingers in it, pulling on the dark locks until Pitch was growling and warm water was beading down Jack’s wrist.

But…

But it wasn’t enough.

The numbing cold was still present. Jack could feel it resting near his heart, waiting for an opening. Waiting for a break.

And like everything else inside of himself, Jack was terrified of it. Terrified it’d hit mute and turn everything into cold, colourless silence.

“ _Jack_ ,” Pitch rumbled, pulling back so he could force Jack’s head up and meet the spirit’s skittish gaze.

“No,” the spirit murmured, dragging wet fingers over Pitch’s jaw. He traced along the forming bruises and healing scratches, up to the corner of his lips. “Come closer.” He twitched uneasily when Pitch’s canines found his fingers and pain shot through the cold digits, but when Jack pulled on the trapped fingers, tugging the man a little closer, Pitch allowed himself to be dragged in against the spirit’s mouth.

Tongues met, and Jack nearly whimpered when he realised that the usual diffusing heat, the heady lust and the twisting in his chest that he always felt whenever Pitch kissed him, had _dulled_.

_No no no NO NO_ , he screamed, and before it could go away completely, Jack’s fingers cut through grey skin, carving their way down Pitch’s throat and back up the nape of his neck, seeking warmth and pain and if anger came with it, that was fine too.

He just didn’t want this cold.

Pitch’s fingers bit into his waist painfully, the muscles under Jack’s fingers tensing. Without any warning, the king’s grip slid from his waist to his thighs, cutting into string and skin until the spirit was lifted, his spine drawing away from the wall only to thump a little too roughly back into it.

His heat was so close that the spirit was _shivering_ , but it still wasn’t _working_. And whether it was because of the cold he was too afraid to let in, the tension still coiling in his mind, or because of the itching resentment he was barely coherently hanging onto, Jack’s couldn’t really care. Desperation had the spirit struggling, moving, wishing the king would _just_ –

But before Jack’s fingers could dip below the back of the man’s shirt in search of _skin_ , Pitch was prying Jack’s hand off his neck and the spirit’s wrist was slammed, with absolutely no gentleness, into the wall by his head.

Pitch bit at his mouth in warning, and when Jack relented with an ungrateful hiss, the Nightmare King mocked, “Are you satisfied yet?” right against his mouth.

With a low grunt, Jack pushed forward to get back at his mouth, trying to drag the king in with his free hand. Pitch let go of his wrist and grabbed him by the jaw so he could smack Jack’s head back into the wall with wince-worthy force. “Use your words, Jack. I’m not a fool. Why are you upset?”

Talking about his problems was decidedly _not_ why Jack was there, and just as he felt like snapping as much, he realised with a start what exactly he was trying to do.

He remembered weeks ago, on his hands and knees in Yves’s woods, begging Pitch to kiss him only to be clearly ignored.

_Am I trying to use him?_ he thought, his breath hitching in his chest. _No, I need him to help me. He’s_ helping _me. But… isn’t that just the same thing?_

Guilt jabbed at Jack, and the spirit let go of Pitch while he was still coherent enough to do it. “I’m sorry,” he croaked. “I’m sorry, shit let me –”

The spirit glanced down at the floor as he tried to squirm his way out of Pitch’s hold, and went rigid when he spied the jagged ice all around Pitch’s boots.

_Fuck,_ the spirit panicked, his grip on the king tightening so fiercely that Pitch actually flinched. _When did that get there? That could have_ hurt _him, and I didn’t even_ realise _there was ice growing there._

Why hadn’t Pitch _said_ anything?

“Let go of me,” Jack demanded, and when Pitch just gave him a sidelong look with his golden eyes, the spirit’s voice cracked and he smacked the stupid king on his ridiculously well-built shoulders. “Pitch, I could have hurt you, let _go_ of me!”

The spirit felt Pitch’s nose touch his cheekbone, nudge into the flesh like the man was nuzzling the spirit, and literally everything about the gesture, the _closeness_ , had Jack exhaling an involuntary and very shaky breath.

“Give my reflexes more credit,” the king murmured against his skin.

Jack smacked him again. “Say that to me that when you’re not standing in a pile of pointy ice!”

Sighing, Pitch pulled back from Jack’s cheek and knocked his forehead into the spirit’s. “What did Skreeklavic say to you?” he asked, his voice shifting from a dark murmur into a low growl as he completely _ignored_ Jack’s panicking.

“Put me down first,” the spirit gritted out.

With a roll of his eyes, Pitch finally cracked his boots out of the ice on the floor, and spun so he could dump Jack on his feet in the middle of the room. The spirit immediately scurried for his staff – so he could make a break for it, of course – but Pitch, the jerk, blocked off his path.

The spirit groaned. “What makes you think he said anything?”

“You’ve been in a mood ever since he spoke to you.”

_Why does he have to be so damn observant when his paranoia isn’t getting in the way?_ the spirit mentally grumbled. Wanting more than anything to avoid talking about this yet, his eyes skirted away from the king and involuntarily fell toward the mess of ice half clawing up the wall. Without even meaning to, he found himself murmuring absently, “I used to have better control over that.”

Pitch just hummed, apparently not very sympathetic to the mountain of emotional and physical strength Jack once was eons ago, and muttered, “And you call me exhausting.”

Jack’s eyes rolled up to the king, highly unappreciative of the man’s attitude, and paused a little when he noticed that Pitch was shooting the doorway a very unimpressed look.

The spirit glanced over his shoulder, half terrified that maybe Phoenix was standing there ready to beat the shit out of him for making out with Pitch. He relaxed substantially when he saw that it was only Io and Mo waiting on the footpath outside.

Pitch, however, seemed even less pleased than usual at their arrival, and grumbled, “We’re leaving,” as he collected up his dusty clothes and threw Jack his staff.

“Why –?”

But apparently Pitch wasn’t in the mood for question time, and he took Jack by the back of the head and kissed the ever-loving shit out of him to highlight as much.

It was startling, to say the least, and just a little bit violent. But a kiss was a kiss, and Jack should have positively melted into the touch.

But he still didn’t. _Couldn’t_. The ice was threatening to take everything away, to tear the layers off Jack’s skin until he couldn’t feel a single thing, and his heart wouldn’t work until it was _gone_.

And it seemed that Pitch, ever observant Pitch, could tell as much – or a near approximation of as much – from the kiss alone, and he let go of Jack with a dark, examining expression.

The frost spirit twitched a little as warmth left his skin, and with his eyes flittering their way across the floor, he heard Pitch heave another suffering sigh and say, “Follow me.”

The king brushed past Jack, and he turned in time to see Pitch carve a path between Io and Mo and stalk off with his laundry under his arm. “Yes, sir,” the spirit muttered, feeling a little like a directionally impaired puppy having to be led around by the nose to keep it from wandering off.

_That’s actually probably how they all see me at this point_ , he thought as he watched a handful of loitering wolves throw Pitch various morning greetings – to which he actually replied, albeit with one sweeping, barely-growled, “ _Morning_ ”.

“You guys coming?” he asked the scaries as he walked between them. Both of them instantly clambered to his side, and the three of them followed after a king who wasn’t even waiting for them, the fucker, through the barely-woken barracks and toward the stables.

“We destroying those shelves?” Jack asked when the king beelined for the giant stable door.

“Not today,” Pitch said, tossing his clothes on the ground so he could begin to bodily shift the sliding door open with more than a few pained winces. “They’ve been given a purpose until further notice.”

“Boo.”

Pitch went back to ignoring the spirit as he – with notably strained movements, and the odd curse – wrestled the door into an opened position, and Jack turned from the guy and spied the two scaries huddling behind a tree.

Four beady eyes watched him from behind the safety of their barricade, and the very fact that they thought they needed a barricade when Jack was around made concern spread through the spirit’s veins.

“What’s wrong with you two?” he asked, walking up and squatting in front of the pair.

Usually, some soft words could move Mo into clinging to Jack for an entire day, but this time Mo shuffled back when Jack lowered himself to their level, turning its tiny body in toward Io who just spun and smacked Mo on the head with its own melon skull.

A hurt pang hit Jack right in the heart, and he bit the inside of his cheek as he watched the smaller scarie _cower_. “Mo, what’s up? If this is about yesterday, I’m not mad, I promise. Io’s pulled that sort of thing on me before.”

Through teary eyes, Mo just blinked at him, and Jack sat his ass down on the ground. “Do you feel bad because you were in Yves’s house? Because as long as he doesn’t know –”

Then a thought occurred to Jack, one he probably should have pieced together earlier, and he interrupted himself to ask, “Did I find those herbs because of you two?”

His question was more than answered when Mo made a distressed sound and hid behind Io.

Jack frowned at the pair of them, his confusion welling as he tried to make sense of what he was being told. Why would the scaries bother to show Jack the herbs when they usually just played together for days on end, barely sparing anyone else a second glance except Jack when he found the strength to join them? Save for that time Io had been trying to run off with North’s swords, he’d never really known the scaries to have any sort of _agenda_ – really, any goal at all except for frolicking mindlessly with one another or following Jack around like lost children.

Did they just want him to know what the people around him were doing for him? Were they concerned for him?

Then another thought occurred to the frost spirit, an unsettling one. “How did you two even know what was in Yves’s kitchen? Or how to open a cupboard. The pair of you have no arms.”

The scaries just gazed at him, and Jack swallowed as that unsettling feeling caused a few more questions to float to the surface of his mind like a wet, drowned leaf.

Like, how had Mo known that Jack was friendly when they’d first met? The scarie pointedly did not cling to anyone else besides Jack so it couldn’t be _that_ trusting. And did the smaller scarie know in that snowy town that Jack was babysitting Io? Because the two spirits clearly knew each other and Jack couldn’t think of any other reason Mo would have so insistently returned to the realm with him other than to see Io again.

Their meeting that day in that snow-covered town had been by chance… hadn’t it?

Mo made a small sound, a sad one, and Jack looked up at the crying scarie. He sighed. Even if it hadn’t been by chance, he didn’t have the heart to suspect them of anything remotely strange. Jack smiled tiredly and held his hand out to the scarie. “I really don’t care, Mo. You don’t have to be –”

In the space of a second, Io rushed him, jumping forward and onto Jack’s toes and cracking its head right into Jack’s forehead. With an ache reverberating through his skull and a face full of that horrifying, fangy smile, the frost spirit toppled backwards in surprise, only for Io to fucking follow him down, trampling over Jack’s chest so it could get right into Jack’s face and –

White blasted into his vision, and along with it came the sensation of heat, of chaos and death.

_“FROST! FROST WHERE THE FUCK ARE YOU? FROST! SO HELP ME –”_

_Ice ghosted over his limbs, the faintest touch. The familiar voice faded, drawing further away as his own formed sound without his permission, “Who are you?”_

_A split, a smile, and darkness pouring, twisting, grabbing and lashing and cutting, sawing, crackling and then starting again. Sound entered his ears, and for a second it was so hauntingly brittle, as if a single complimentary sound would make the words splinter like bone, that everything else fell into dead silence._

_Then the sound shifted, turned inside out and skewed his eardrums, lancing through flesh and cartilage and curling, growing into his brain, digging, searching –_

_“Would you look what we have ‘ere. Care to introduce us, Snowflake?”_

The light abruptly fled, along with the agonising pain screwing into his earholes, and Jack had barely enough time to register the scratching whimper he could hear, the tearing in his throat he could feel, the hands on his face jerking his head up and a voice saying his name, telling him to inhale, before agony scorched through his lungs and the spirit fell into a coughing fit that, mercifully, cracked his airways open just enough to suck in a cleansing breath.

_I hate hearing that voice_ , he thought tiredly, and blinked before gazing up into the eyes of a king who looked seriously done with Jack’s shit.

“Why are you looking at me like this is my fault?” the spirit croaked, and Pitch pinched the bridge of his nose for a moment before sending a dark look off into the trees – probably toward where the scaries had scurried off.

Pitch grumbled under his breath as he got to his feet, pulling Jack up by his hood and carting the spirit off into the stables.

As he was dragged off, Jack’s eyes blearily searched the tree line for any sign of his strange little ghost spirits, silently wanting to know why they were so distressed. He caught a flash of white amongst the dark trunks, but then Pitch was yanking him into the stables, cutting him off from the scaries and the light of day.

In the dank little room with the poorly constructed shelves, Jack was tossed into a pair of stacked crates sitting against the wall, and he was forced to redirect his concern from outside to the man beginning to pace in front of him. He took a moment to gauge the irritation the king was exuding (not critical levels, thankfully), before throwing his gaze toward his left and noticing that Pitch seemed to have made himself at home rearranging all the crates into a workbench he could lay his scythe out on.

_Dear god, it’s so much bigger up close._

“What did it show you?”

Jack flinched, fingers gripping his staff a little tighter. He didn’t know what he’d just seen, there’d been too much chaos, too much darkness and sharpness and then pain to make sense of it. But he knew too well what he’d just _heard_ , and he’d rather chew off his own tongue than talk about it.

_“Would you look what we have ‘ere. Care to introduce us, Snowflake?”_

The spirit shuddered, and Pitch took Jack by the chin to redirect his eyes back to the king. “No? Then tell me, what _does_ it show you? The thing did that to you yesterday, didn’t it? And on Halloween.”

A little irked that Pitch hadn’t even bothered to learn the scaries’ names yet, Jack muttered, “ _Io_ shows me things that happened in the forest. The stuff I can’t remember.”

_The memories that apparently aren’t even mine._

Pitch nodded, almost exaggeratedly, like he’d already gathered as much – and he probably already had, just from Jack’s fears. The spirit forcibly removed his chin from Pitch’s grip. “I can’t give you specifics ‘cause none of it’s clear. It’s mostly just a lot of voices and sensory stuff. Like, children laughing and talking. Phoenix yelling at me.” He remembered yesterday, standing outside the cottage as agony tore through his shoulder. Absently, Jack’s fingers ghosted along the spot he’d witnessed blood pour from as he added, “Pain.”

Jack felt a hand skim beneath his own, and the spirit looked up as Pitch slid a thumb and two of his fingers along the side of Jack’s neck and beneath his hoodie, peeling back the material. It lasted barely longer than a moment, Pitch’s expression remaining perfectly unmoved as he gazed at Jack’s exposed skin with Jack staring back at him, and as it passed the spirit felt another word touch the tip of his tongue.

“Fire,” he said. Pitch glanced at his face, and finally let Jack’s hoodie go. “When you went into my head in the Emporium, there were burnt bodies floating in the water. Do you remember that?”

Pitch’s forehead creased a little, and Jack couldn’t tell if his flat answer of, “I was too preoccupied trying not to have an aneurism to take much notice,” was a lie or a careful admission.

The spirit licked his lips. “Then you don’t remember the other thing I saw?”

The king’s gaze sharpened just a little. “I do remember. Do you know what it was?”

The question held a touch of caution, and Jack just stared at him for a few moments.

He sifted through his memory and recalled the spikes that had curled over Pitch’s face that day, the awful cracking sound they’d made and their malicious intent.

_…digging, searching…_

Absently, his fingers itched to scratch over the back of his neck, to make sure there was nothing lingering there to pierce through and into his skull again.

_“Who are you?”_

“No,” the spirit eventually said, and the response must have sounded weak, even to Pitch’s ears, because the Nightmare King moved a step closer to the smaller male.

“Are you lying to me?”

Jack’s eyes flashed at the man. “Why would I?”

Pitch seemed a little taken back by the response, and Jack used the moment to tilt his head toward the massive weapon he was sitting next to and say, “This your new scythe?”

The king’s eyes narrowed at the topic change, but having gotten absolutely nowhere with his spontaneous interrogation – really, with any of the questions he’d asked Jack that morning – he seemed to finally give up altogether and just went along with Jack’s detour.

_Hopefully he doesn’t throw me against a wall later on and try getting his answers by force_ , Jack thought mildly. He really couldn’t be bothered getting thrown against anything unless it involved some hot and heavy groping, but knowing Pitch there was probably going to be some frustrating violence in Jack’s near future.

“I picked it up from the smith yesterday,” the serial wall-slammer replied as he threw the clothes he was still hanging onto over on the shelves.

_The metal’s so dark_ , Jack thought as Pitch began fussing around with some equipment he seemed to have stockpiled in this place. He considered reaching out and touching the blade, to see if the colour was a product of the metal or if it was merely an illusion of shadows.

Not a moment later, though, he saw the darkness collecting around the blade, skimming and wafting like smoke, and Jack’s fingers curled tighter over his staff.

“You completely ignored my design ideas,” he mentioned as Pitch dropped a handful of black leather straps onto his workbench.

“Stop trying to make small talk and come over here and help me.”

_Teamwork_? Jack thought as he pushed off the crates and walked around to Pitch’s other side. The original tan strappings, neatly unwound from the handle, were discarded in a pile by the base of the weapon, apparently unworthy of the Nightmare King’s dark aesthetic. Jack was given a few lengths of the leather and pointed toward the opposite end of the scythe Pitch seemed to be tampering with.

“Start wrapping the handle from the base.”

The spirit set his staff down on a crate as he felt over the hide in his hand. “I’ll get ice on it.”

Pitch just shook his head at the concern. “If it can’t stand a little ice, it’s of no use to me.”

Jack snorted. _Is that a thinly veiled threat, or meant to make me feel better?_

With fingers that lacked a wide variety of artistic talents, Jack tried his hardest not to do a fucking awful job of satisfying Pitch’s need for a totally-black ensemble. He took instruction when Pitch noticed he was doing something a little too odd to be fully salvageable, and as he twisted and pulled and tucked, he found that it was a nice to be of use for once.

It gave him something to focus on – something that distracted him a little from the cold, the static, from everything that was a little too much to process.

It was just…nice to _help_.

After what was probably only a few minutes of busy quiet, with Pitch trying to convince the shadows lingering on the surface of the blade to actually get _into_ the metal and Jack trying not to curse too loudly at the way the straps kept goddamn _slipping_ , the spirit looked up at Pitch for help when he noticed something tossed haphazardly on the very farthest crate of the makeshift workbench.

“What’s that?”

Pitch glance at Jack to see where he was pointing, and his mouth instantly turned down in displeasure when his eyes found the dark square Jack had highlighted. “A letter.”

Jack blinked. “Yves gets mail here? _How_?”

“Persistence,” the king said dryly.

“Are you gonna open it?” he asked just as the surface of the envelope began to… _move_?

As someone who had never actually received mail, a decent part of Jack was curious to know who on earth sent the illustrious Nightmare King fucking _mail_. After all, weren’t villains more into the whole head-on-a-pike form of communication? Or with like, message-carrying vultures or something?

That said, the rest of him was noticing the black sludge beginning to leak out of the envelope, along with the almost sentient way it was bubbling, and it was pestering his curiosity to reconsider its nosiness.

“Uh, Pitch, it’s leaking.”

Pitch glanced over at the envelope with an unhappy expression. “It usually does that.”

“You know who it’s from?” Jack assumed.

“Unfortunately,” the king said disinterestedly. “It’s some New Year’s nonsense from the wife of one of my old allies.”

_I thought he hated all his old allies_ , Jack thought as he chewed the inside of his cheek. _So why is he still exchanging greeting cards with the_ wife _of one, no less?_

The only answer Jack could think of made him feel ill, and he hated himself a little for even being surprised at the fact that Pitch might have lovers up his sleeves. He was a good looking guy after all, built like some god and capable of being charming when it was completely necessary.

_Maybe that’s why he so readily agreed to my no-sex request_ , Jack thought bitterly, and then remembered that his acidic thoughts had joked about exactly this back when he was in the fae realm. _I really fucking hate it when they’re right._

The cold crackled beside his heart, _offering_.

Jack exhaled as his curiosity, his wariness, and the nice feeling he’d gotten from helping the asshole were beaten down by the conclusions he was drawing. With barely a grain of interest managing to worm back into Jack’s mind, the spirit gave up fumbling with the leather straps and quietly made his way around a working Pitch, ignoring the way the king’s eyes followed him as he went and picked up the moving envelope.

Illuminated by the light of his staff, Jack gingerly pulled the folded card from the slime, doing his best to prevent any of the moving gunk from touching him. He flipped the card over, a little disappointed that there weren’t any images or anything on any of the surfaces.

_The cards North has lying around are always covered in colours and pictures_ , he thought with a hint of sadness. _I guess villains don’t get pretty greeting cards._

The frost spirit grimaced when he cracked the card open and noticed the scrawl covering both sides of the interior. “There’s a lot of writing,” he mumbled, shifting his grip quickly so the slime wouldn’t gloop down his arm, so all the slithering words weren’t in his direct line of sight.

Pitch’s eyes narrowed. “What does it say?”

“Here,” the frost spirit said, holding the card out to the man between pinched fingers.

Giving Jack an odd look, Pitch read through the cursive words swiftly, eyes scanning both sides of the card with obvious annoyance. “How these messages manage to find me every year is still beyond my comprehension,” he muttered, and then frowned.

Jack nearly didn’t want to ask, but he was a curious creature even when his heart was hurting, and a mild, “Is it something bad?” rolled off his tongue.

Pitch’s frown turned into an irritated scowl, and he snapped the card shut. “No, just annoying. You can read it if you really want to.”

The spirit ducked past the card when it was held out to him, admitting a quiet, “I can’t,” as he returned to the handle of the scythe, black straps faintly dusted with a touch of frost.

He felt Pitch’s eyes on him after a moment, and glanced at the _Do Continue_ look the man was giving him with his brows. The spirit nodded his head toward the card and said, if maybe a tad defensively, “Lots of words like that just start moving around. Can’t read ‘em.”

Pitch looked back down at the mess of writing covering the interior of the card, and Jack went back to tightening up his masterpiece of strapping, not really sure what he was excepting the king to say.

_Is he gonna laugh at me? Say “Oh never mind then” and toss the card since it isn’t even like I can find out for myself anyway? Or will he just sit it right between us until the words move so much they glide right off the card and stain my skin with whatever secrets that woman is sending to him?_

But, proving that Jack’s imagination probably needed a healthy shot of optimism, Pitch just accepted the information without even a mildly curious question, and Jack was flat out relieved that sometimes Pitch wasn’t as big of an asshole as Jack usually assumed he was.

The king flipped the card over with his fingers, inspecting the back as he held the dripping thing well away from his scythe and his boots. “This woman’s husband is a cannibal god who I had a business deal with centuries ago. Apparently he wants to meet again.”

_She doesn’t even get a named mention?_ Jack thought as an involuntary and snide little twitch jerked his shoulders. Somewhere else in his mind, though – somewhere his growing tiredness hadn’t quite reached yet – he remembered, faintly, Skreek and Pitch fawning over the topic of cannibals and Africa during Halloween. “Do you like this guy as opposed to all the others?”

Pitch made a disgusted face and tossed the card over his shoulder. “Absolutely not. I’d rather witness his messy disembowelment than ever have a conversation with him again.”

Jack watched the card flutter to the floor, almost disappearing in the darkness of the room. “Then why don’t you do that?”

Pitch looked at him steadily. “I will once I have an army capable of annihilating his.”

“Were the Nightmares not strong enough?”

Unsurprisingly, anger cut down the king’s forehead. “I barely had a full force of them before I was stripped of control,” Pitch snapped. “Remember?”

_Ah, so it’s still a touchy subject_ , Jack thought as he raised his palms up in surrender.

Pitch grumbled something under his breath, and they were close enough, the stables were quiet enough, that Jack realised he actually couldn’t understand a word of what Pitch was muttering.

Biting off a harsh word in whatever language he was speaking, Pitch stalked over to the door and dragged the two halves shut with a grunt. “Stop your staff from glowing,” Pitch ordered as he brushed past Jack and separated a shirt and pants from his pile of dusty clothes. He began throwing the garments over the blade, as if the very fact that they were dark might _help_. “It’s chasing away the shadows.”

Jack’s eyebrows twitched at the request. _If you were stronger the shadows wouldn’t be bothered by such a faint glow_ , he thought at the asshole, and for a moment contemplated just upping and leaving and finding a nice, quiet, bright place to stick his head between his legs and hyperventilate.

_Well, it was sort of fun while it lasted,_ the spirit thought, throwing his half-finished handle a mournful look.

“I understand that you’re not afraid of the dark,” Pitch said, startling Jack. “You’re afraid of being blindsided in zero visibility.”

The frost spirit stiffened at the observation, at the _distinction_ Pitch was clearly making between the two, and after a moment of damning silence on Jack’s side, Pitch’s eyes slid to the frost spirit and in an unwavering tone he stated, “I can see perfectly in this kind of darkness, so unless you’re afraid of me, you don’t have to be concerned.”

Dumfounded, Jack gawked at the guy, and when Pitch returned his attention to his weapon – Jack hoped with a shred of embarrassment because what the _fuck_ – a small, wonky smile began working its way up Jack’s face.

His heart shivered happily, swatting away a bit more of the numbing cold, and Jack was glad, in a way, that Pitch was emotionally constipated enough not to engage in any further eye contact. He still wasn’t entirely sure if their relationship was stable enough to ensure that Pitch wouldn’t outright punch the smile right off Jack’s face.

_Glad the thoughts aren’t here either. Although I can imagine a little too vividly what they’d say in a situation like this._

With his smile waning, Jack left his unfinished leather work – he couldn’t so much as tie a knot in this darkness, anyway – and wandered away from Pitch to inspect the rest of the room. The glow from his staff was minimal enough that a good few feet would leave Pitch in complete darkness, so the bastard shouldn’t complain if Jack was on the very other side of the room.

_Maybe I should still leave_ , Jack thought quietly, nearly bumping into a stable door. _The reassurance is nice, but he doesn’t understand the reason for the fear – or the fact that it’s so illogical there’s no point in trying to rationalise it away._

Running his hand along the low wood and sending ice in his touch’s wake, Jack threw over his shoulder, “Shouldn’t you be a little more worried about exploiting my fears?”

Utterly unconcerned, Pitch replied, “After being with you in this place for so long, I have an abundance of fears I could exploit if I wanted to.”

The voice, the quiet threat, stretched through the darkness and wrapped around Jack’s throat gently, curling like fingers and tracing the spirit’s jaw. The spirit shivered, just a little, and had to look over his shoulder to make sure that Pitch’s glowing eyes were still on the other side of the room.

_Even with so much of his power gone, he’s still got a hell of a presence in the darkness._

“Then why don’t you?” the spirit asked. “You’ve got an army to recommission, after all.”

His words were met with silence – and even in utter darkness, it took Jack barely a moment to realise that it was a very unhappy brand of silence. He blinked and suddenly two furious, golden eyes were pinned on him.

Eyes that seemed torn between fury and complete _shock_.

“If this is that damn tea –” The king sighed heavily, the gold disappearing for a moment as he wiped his hands over his face, and returning again when he turned a sharp look onto Jack. “That day, when we went to get this metal from my lair, why did you help that Nightmare? Why did she _let_ you?”

Choking on a ball of saliva that had apparently wanted no part in his conversation – Jack seriously couldn’t blame it – the spirit coughed in surprise. “Why are you asking me about that now?”

The gold narrowed further, and Jack sensed a churning calculation in Pitch’s stare that would’ve made the spirit sweat if he was capable. “You said recommission. It reminded me of the fact that you never answered my questions about the Nightmare you saved.”

Because he’d… forgotten? Was that why he’d mentioned the tea?

Swallowing an uneasy feeling, Jack tried to sort through his limited options of how to get the hell out of this conversation. Honestly, with the luck the spirit had been having that morning, he really just should have stayed in bed with Phoenix.

Or, better yet, convinced the fire spirit to fall asleep so he could leave and bury himself in some snow. Snow didn’t argue with him, didn’t ask him invasive questions that either he was incapable of answering or just flat out didn’t want to. Snow didn’t…

No. No, it was the _cold_ that didn’t ask questions, didn’t fight. It only numbed and cleansed.

_Fuck. No, none of that. How about anger? Yeah, I’ll try anger and see if I can’t scream my way out of this conversation… maybe scare the cold off while I’m at it…_ Gritting his teeth, the spirit spat, “Yeah because you had me pinned against a fucking wall, excuse me for –”

“ _Jack_.”

A literal brick wall was thrown in front of Jack’s diversion attempt, and whatever rage the spirit had been trying to summon dissolved all too quickly. Averting his eyes, he muttered, “She probably realised help when she saw it.”

With a harsh, grating laugh, Pitch was across the room and shoving a cursing Jack back into the stall door with a hand on his collarbone and eyes that _burned_. “Don’t think I don’t notice when my own words are being recycled. Give me an actual answer.”

Breath stuttering – because _fuck_ , he’d nearly forgotten how frightening this wall-slamming asshole was in low visibility – Jack tried to struggle out of the hold, to absolutely _no_ avail, and ended up snapping, “I didn’t mean for that hail to happen. Boreas messes with my winds sometimes, but my magic can usually balance his out. I didn’t mean for it to –”

“Jack,” Pitch warned again, and Jack’s hand tightened on his wrist.

“It’s cruel to leave something hurt,” he bit.

“Then you should have let me _kill_ her,” the king growled.

“I saw that look on your face!” Jack blurted. “Like _you_ were the one who’d gotten hit.”

Face half lit by Jack’s staff, the spirit watched as Pitch’s eyes went wide, in shock and maybe a shred of disgust. But Jack knew he was right, and this defensive response was all he needed to confirm what he’d seen that day. Grip tightening on Jack’s hoodie, Pitch began to snarl angrily, “You were –”

“Yeah, see!” Jack interrupted, and quickly, before Pitch could try and shut him up to have his piece, the spirit bit out, “I didn’t want to say anything because I knew you’d get all huffy. I saw what I saw and I did what I did, you fucking asked so don’t get mad at me for having a shred of compassion.”

Pitch let go of him with a jerk of his wrist, and utterly fed up with the tension this morning had brought into Jack’s life, the spirit slid to the ground and just fucking sat there with his elbows on his knees and his palms massaging his eyeballs.

_I’m sick of fighting. And the thoughts aren’t even here to pick them, this is all just_ us _…_

The thought made Jack’s heart squeeze sadly, and the spirit breathed long through his nose to try and clam himself down.

“She was the first Nightmare I ever made.”

Jack flinched at the admission, at the melancholy he could hear in Pitch’s voice, and he looked up to see the Nightmare King massaging his own eye sockets with his thumb and finger.

_Guess this is giving him a headache too._

“She’s pretty,” Jack said quietly. When Pitch just snorted, the spirit kicked the guy in the shin with the heel of his foot. “Yeah, I know. Blah blah we nearly got killed by a heap of them blah they’re evil so fucking what. You made her, yeah? And you did a good job so shut up and take the compliment.”

Nearly one with the darkness, Jack thought he could see a little astonishment on Pitch’s face as the man stared down at the spirit. It could have been his imagination, though. “Why haven’t I killed you yet?” the king mused.

Jack poked his tongue out at him. “Thousand-watt smile. Impressive physique. Excellent bodyguard.”

“As I recall, you nearly got us killed that day too.”

“Ah, _Boreas_ nearly got us killed. _I_ saved our lives.”

“Of course, I’ll have it put on record.”

Jack grinned just a little when he saw the king’s eyes roll, and he watched the guy disappear back into the darkness as he returned to pestering his scythe.

“I suppose it’s handy that the Nightmares can’t pass through the Emporium’s wards,” Jack thought aloud, knocking his head back into the wood of the stall door. “Gives you a break from fighting them. Is that why you’re working there?”

Thanks to the sheets of darkness between them, he was oblivious the way Pitch’s shoulders tensed at the remark. Oblivious to everything but the tightness in his voice as the king replied, “It is not the reason, no. But it was a benefit.”

It took a moment for Jack to register the odd tone of Pitch’s voice, and in the next, his mind turned over and he remembered standing on Yves’s lawn that day they’d headed out to the fae realm, Jack asking Pitch how he fought his Nightmares while the smith was crafting his scythes.

And his thought’s response – one he’d ignored, until now.

Realisation flittered through his mind, and Jack’s blood ran a little colder.

“Is that why you’re _here_?” the spirit murmured, and he wished he could see through the darkness to witness Pitch’s reaction because the man was silent – dead fucking silent – and the lack of response had Jack rising to his feet.

“Pitch, tell me they’re not the reason you stayed on Halloween.”

The line seemed to make something tick in the Nightmare King, and Jack saw a flash of his eyes, all that gold with a speckle of silver and then black like the darkness surrounding him. Jack’s heart began to pick up in his chest the closer he got to the man, and as the corner of the crates were illuminated, a shred of the scythe, and finally a slice of Pitch’s face, the poor organ in Jack’s chest hammered itself into near pain.

The spirit could have threaded his fingers through the taut lines of hostility across Pitch’s skin, the almost daring look that had entered the man’s eyes. The _danger_. The king’s entire being was telling Jack to just shut up while he still had a head, but this wasn’t something Jack wanted to let go. He had to _know_.

Exhaling a shallow breath, the spirit said, “Tell me the reason you stayed with us wasn’t because you were hiding from what you created.”

Pitch’s lip curled angrily, defensively. “Just because I have no objection to playing with you, does not mean you have any authority to talk to me like this.”

Jack recoiled a little at the bite, at the way the guy was so blatantly ignoring what he’d so diplomatically told Jack last night.

His heart punching into a higher gear, the spirit dropped his staff beside the scythe and decided that he’d take Pitch up on his offer, after all. “Oh really?” he said coldly. “You’re not gonna let me talk? Fine, then.”

And he threw a punch right at Pitch’s face.

Although, as promised by the omens of Jack’s hindsight, throwing punches at a guy with inhuman reflexes was not as easy as Tooth had made it look all those years ago. In fact, just the forward thrust of Jack’s fist had Pitch’s attack responses flashing, and before the spirit could try any sort of counter manoeuvre (ha, as if he knew any), Pitch had slid out of the way of Jack’s fist, caught the spirit by the wrist, and used the spirit’s momentum to send Jack crashing to the concrete floor.

“Ha,” the spirit coughed, “I told you you’d just kick my ass if I tried to fight you.”

Pitch said nothing, did nothing, and Jack glanced over his shoulder only to roll his eyes at the wariness Pitch was evaluating him with.

“Don’t look at me like that,” the spirit said as he hefted himself up onto his knees. He tilted his head back at the king. “This is all me, Pitch, so if you wanna hit me feel free.”

The man’s fists twitched, as if he really fucking wanted to just slug the spirit giving him so much grief, but after a tense moment he wussed out and growled, “I’ve had enough brawling for today. Just tell me what your damn problem is.”

_Oh, he’s gonna let me talk now?_

Getting to his feet, his heart _stinging_ , Jack stepped right up into Pitch’s face and refused to move inch even when the Nightmare King bared his teeth like an angry dog. With a voice hardened by ice but weakened by pain, the spirit yelled, “Right now, you’re my damn problem. Those Nightmares are yours. YOURS! You made them and you think you have the privilege to just leave them? They’re your responsibility. You brought them into this world, you don’t get to fucking leave them.”

Pitch was looking at him as if Jack was crazy – but he _wasn’t_ crazy. He knew what he was saying, and it might not have been the easiest thing, but it was the fucking right thing even if –

“The alternative is getting eaten by them,” Pitch snarled. “I am trying to _survive_.”

“Then get _stronger_. You’ve been searching for ways to defend yourself against them, but have you made any effort to get them back?”

“Of course I have!” he roared. Jack instinctively flinched back – which he could have kicked himself for, because seriously, he should be used to getting shouted at by now – and Pitch scrubbed a hand over his face and groaned loudly. “I am not having this conversation with you. Get out.”

“Why not,” Jack demanded, and fevered gold landed on the spirit.

“Because it’s none of your business. Whatever this is –” he gestured between the two of them with a flick of his finger “– doesn’t give you the right to pry into what I do. It gives you no rights at all, so take your fucking audacity and leave with it. I haven’t held back from killing –,” he cut himself off with a harsh little click of his jaw, and it took Pitch a long moment before he managed to say, “I haven’t spent these weeks trying to _help_ you with your damn problems to listen to this. Get _out_.”

But Jack wasn’t scared of this guy – and he wasn’t done, either. “What did you try?”

“I will make you leave, Jack, if you –”

“What did you _try_?” the spirit pushed, scrambling in front of the king when he turned from him. “Before you started hacking at them with a fucking blade, did you try to talk to them? To get their respect again?”

“You know nothing about how Nightmares work,” Pitch spat, and Jack went very still.

With disastrously poor timing, the giant stable doors slid open with a loud tear of metal and rust, and Jack watched Pitch scowl over at the werewolf lodged bodily between the two open doors, as if he’d used himself to wedge them open.

“Pitch! We –” His excitement drained a little when he noticed Jack, and probably smelled the palpable tension between the two males. “Uh, we’ve gotta get started if we’re gonna stay on schedule…”

“I’m coming,” Pitch muttered, storming past the frost spirit without even a breath of contact.

The pair left Jack behind – alone with the static, the numbing cold, the darkness.

But it was fine.

He didn’t need Pitch’s warmth. He couldn’t let himself rely on it, anyway, what with the way he was slowly breaking apart even with the king near him.

No. Instead, he had something else beginning to roar through his veins.

Anciently familiar and almost intangible, it burned colder than any ice Jack could summon, and yet it was far from the dead, silent shards of cold snapped off from Boreas’s power. It gave more than it took, screamed and crushed and thundered instead of freezing everything into dead silence.

Jack’s eyes squeezed shut as icy breath cascaded past his lips, as a cold older than Winter itself infused with his blood.

And finally, mercifully, the encroaching numbness fled. It dissolved in Jack’s chest as his heart set itself a very different rhythm, a determined one, and he cracked his eyes open and turned from the stables, from Pitch’s workspace and the darkness, and marched back through the trees toward the house.

He was trembling again.

But for the first time in such a long time, it wasn’t out of fear.

 

“Hey, Yves.”

Fussing around in the (thankfully, vacant) kitchen, the king looked up at the sound of his name, and Jack swore he did a double take when he caught the look on the face of the spirit standing beside his sink.

With an amused expression, Yves dropped his feather duster into the pocket of his apron and approached the spirit. “Yes, bony Jack?”

“Can I ask for a favour? A big one.”

Yves grabbed Jack’s entire fucking face and hauled the slightly shorter male’s head up until the king could get a good look right in Jack’s eye sockets. “What beautiful fire,” Yves crooned, “and what old pain.”

Jack’s eyes narrowed at the barely-there mockery. “I’m fixing this whether he likes it or not.”

Yves pursed his lips, and without needing a shred of context, knowingly asked, “Is this course of action wise, bony Jack? You are engaged in many quarrels nowadays, is this the one you wish to follow through with?”

_He knew?_ Jack thought, a little surprised. But then he remembered that this was _Yves_ , and _of course_ he fucking knew.

“I’ve been picking fights because of –” Jack gritted his teeth, and when he tried to pry his face out of Yves’s hold, the Halloween King only tightened his grip until pain lanced through Jack’s jaw. “Look, I’ve been picking fights that are meaningless. I _know_ that. This isn’t meaningless, though – it’s important.”

Yves’s eyes only sharpened at the explanation. “And what makes you think I want something like that in my realm?”

Jack yanked on Yves’s grip, trying to free himself one more time, only for the man to grind his fingers into Jack’s jaw. “You’re a king too, right?” the spirit ground out.

“And you believe my generosity to be so encompassing?”

“I think you understand him,” Jack argued, and he searched Yves’s amber eyes for a few seconds, hoping that what he was seeing in that pumpkin-hued burn was what Jack thought it was. “Just a little.”

_I know you’re not all sharp edges, Yves. You sewed a pocket onto Lani’s dress, didn’t you?_

With a cluck of his tongue, Yves brought their faces incredibly close, dragging Jack’s chin up until the spirit had to hang onto the sink to keep balance. “I have a price for the favours I grant you, bony Jack.”

The very fact that his answer wasn’t an outright no had Jack smiling, slightly. “Name ‘em.”

After a momentary pause, Yves exhaled a small cackle and let go of Jack’s face so he could sweep an arm toward a lone mug sitting in the centre of his kitchen table. Jack tensed at the sight of the thing, and Yves bumped a hip against the sink so he could say, “Finish the drinks I make you,” right against Jack’s cheek.

Narrowly suppressing the urge to elbow the guy away from him (what was with these damn kings and their intimidation methods?), the spirit glanced at Yves. When he saw nothing but unwavering sharpness in his gaze, Jack sighed and wandered over to the – frankly, ominous – mug.

_I shouldn’t be uneasy about this_ , he told himself as he shifted a dining chair out of his way. _The herbs are helping, right? They must be helping, considering how obnoxious the thoughts are normally, surely they couldn’t have voluntarily sat through an entire morning of near-arguments with Phoenix and Pitch and an actual fight without offering up some sort of commentary._

Surely.

Jack picked up the cup and rolled his fingers over the surface of the porcelain, cooling the hot chocolate that magically managed to mute his internal thoughts.

“How many will there be?” Jack asked, staring into the dark liquid.

“As many as I deem necessary!” Yves called from the staircase.

_Villains and their vague answers_. Jack rolled his eyes as he downed the contents of the mug, cooled liquid sliding uncomfortably down his throat. The second he placed the cup back on the table, hand over his mouth to make sure it all stayed down, a crow came soaring through the open kitchen window, fluttering and flapping and eventually landing on Jack’s shoulder after it had sprayed feathers absolutely everywhere.

“What, don’t trust me not to get killed?” he asked as Yves walked back into the room, Skørj in his hand.

“Would you like me to answer that honestly, bony Jack?”

Jack huffed a laugh, and Yves held Skørj out on a palm. Before Jack could make a move for the thing, the king tossed the crow another, tinier skull. Skørj’s mouth opened and Jack and the crow were abruptly assaulted by smoke and mad cackling.

The spirit threw a hand over his eyes as the smoke encroached, and mentally muttered, _Fuck he really doesn’t trust me not to die_ , as they were reverse-blasted out of the realm.

 

Once the smoke had dispersed, the cackling decaying back into silence, Yves tucked Skørj into an apron pocket and collected up the mug from the table.

Blue fire flashed in his mind, and he found himself murmuring, softly, “A shame…”

 


	25. Poisoning Fear (Part II)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which plans are made, a frost spirit and his trusty sidekick face impending doom, and a king has a gift he really didn't want shoved in his face.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Part II of the update

Pitch was going to kill Jack one of these days.

And the worst part was that he was pretty sure the murder would be mostly accidental – the stupid spirit just kept _crawling_ through the cracks in Pitch’s control and his control was literally the only thing that kept him from spiralling into his old, homicidal, Nightmare King rages.

_He’s trying to test my patience, isn’t he?_ Pitch mentally growled as he stalked alongside Tanton to their next cottage. _He’s trying to shove the entire thing into a meat grinder._

But _why_. The voices were gone – he could tell as much from Jack’s behaviour. So why was the damn spirit still being so difficult? And why didn’t he look the least bit relieved? He’d acted like the weight of the world had been lifted off his shoulders in the fae realm that night, but today he looked even more uneasy than usual. And his _attitude_ was enough to make Pitch want to strangle him.

Maybe too much damage had been done over these last few weeks. Maybe the spirit wasn’t quite as resilient as everyone gave him credit for.

_Or maybe the herbs just didn’t do as thorough of a job as Yves had hoped._

“Uh, should I ask?”

Pitch didn’t even glance at the werewolf before he bit a harsh, “No.”

“Ouch, okay.”

Outside their newest office space, Pitch’s boots paused on the threshold as Tanton bustled on ahead of him, greeting all the wolves waiting around for the pair. Pitch watched as the werewolf began to place all the porcelain incense burners around the room, and his brows knitted together when he was rudely reminded of how shocked he’d been when Jack had brought up his Nightmares.

_I’ve been able to hold grudges for thousands of years, I can remember strategies I mapped out centuries after their conception. My memory was not always like a sieve._

He was still furious at the nerve of the spirit – but more than that, he was starting to worry that all this time he’d spent helping the wolves had permanently impeded his ability to function as highly as he needed to in order to quell his paranoia and deal with the sociability of the people around him.

He was starting to worry that this was something more serious that just losing his edge.

“How do you become immune to this tea?” Pitch asked, and Tanton glanced up from the water jug he was filling in the sink.

Another wolf answered first, and Pitch’s eyes slid to tattoo-bound werewolf as he said, “Gotta rip the wings off some antisocial forest fae.”

“Is that all?” Murder sounded simple enough – and it would probably do Pitch some good to stretch his legs and get some blood on his hands again.

_For so long the shadows did all the dirty work for me_ , he thought, hands clenching at the thought of grinding a few faerie bones. _A change would be nice._

“Ooh, nah nah,” Tanton said, waving his hands to catch Pitch’s attention, “this is more intense than just any old wing-ripping trip. The fae can wipe your brain clean of all your memories with just a few seconds of eye contact, and they travel in packs which makes picking one off next to impossible. And they have these shaman sticks that jangle with this horrifying noise –”

Nearly regretting asking, Pitch’s shoulder knocked into the doorframe, the king wincing a little when the wood dug into his tender muscles. A few of the wolves in the cottage groaned and settled back on the beds they’d been allocated for the day, clearly used to Tanton’s enthusiasm.

“– but the worst part,” the wolf continued, oblivious to his uninterested audience, “is that you have to keep them alive when you take their wings. Which, I mean, isn’t really that bad but it’s a little cringey you know? And I imagine pretty exhausting if you’ve been fighting a band of them for hours and it’d be so easy to just draw blood but you _can’t_ –”

“The immunity part, please,” Pitch interrupted.

With an exasperated sigh, Tanton made some pulling motions with his hands. “Once you tear them off, the wounds where the wings were emit this dust – spores, really, like mushrooms – that get up your nose and into your brain. And bam, immunity.”

Pitch’s nose crinkled in distaste. “It’s almost –”

“Like a prize?” Tanton guessed, a smile curling his mouth that wasn’t the least bit cheerful. “The bodies of those faeries give me anatomical headaches. Like, what kind of natural selection made things like that? I mean, to be able to make this tea, the wings need to be removed from the fae before they die, otherwise their bodies release toxins that negate the memory-dissolving properties of the wings. So these fae become living trophies that obviously get hunted and tortured because they’re no use to anyone dead, and I heard the Imperials used to –”

“Tanton,” a wolf interrupted, looking less than interested in the morbid path Tanton was heading down.

Tanton cast the wolf an apologetic smile. “Yeah, uh, sorry. It’s just…sad, kind of. In an evolutionary way. I’ve heard they make really cool tree carvings, though.”

The wolf just rolled her eyes, and sensing that his potential plan was already starting to crumble, Pitch started folding up his sleeves as he finally stepped into the cottage. The whole immunity thing still didn’t sound too complicated, but if memory-wiping was the fae’s only real means of defence, then Pitch imagined it was probably a powerful tool.

And he really couldn’t be bothered having his memories erased.

Tanton nudged him with an elbow as Pitch started lighting up all the burners. “Why’re you asking?”

The king shrugged and went with a casual, “Might come in use,” as a wick _fooshed_ in ignition.

But the werewolf was still frowning at him. “You getting any of those symptoms I’ve told you about? Headaches? Memory loss? Fever dreams?”

Pitch nearly snorted at the question. So many weeks cramped in confined spaces with the werewolf, and he’d become a little too perceptive. After a moment of contemplating whether it was worth the hassle – and deciding that if Tanton found out on his own, he’d be utterly insufferable – the king admitted a low, “The first two.”

“ _What_?” the wolf exclaimed. “Since when?”

“Truthfully?”

Tanton groaned and plucked the lighter out of the king’s hand, tossing it over his head and into the sink before shooing Pitch out of the cottage. Once again back outside, exposed to the wolves who waved at both of them as they passed by, Tanton stuck his hands on his hips and began to actually chastise the Nightmare King. “Pitch, as your doctor –”

Of which Pitch could only stand a full second and a half before he held up a hand to shut the damn werewolf up. “The first week we started this. The migraines usually set in at the end of the day but are gone by the time I wake up, and I just noticed the memory loss yesterday. It’s only short term, as far as I can tell.”

Tanton’s shoulders sagged at the news. “You really should have told me this earlier. The effects can be permanent. I mean, look at me, I’ve been having fitful sleeps for the last week or so and I have literally harassed every single pack member for sleep remedies because fuck dreaming like that every single night for the rest of my life.” Pulling a notepad out of his back pocket, the wolf began to write as he kept talking. “We’ll get your headaches fixed with some of Olivia’s smelling salts – that woman knows her way around salts, she is such a goddess and I should probably steal some flowers for her before she wakes up ‘cause I bet Yanov’s too busy stressing to remember – and we’ll be done in a few days so hopefully that memory loss clears up after that –”

Pitch peered at the wolf as Tanton scribbled a little square around ‘ _Pick flowers for Yanov to give to Olivia_ ’ and sighed when his own medical needs were underlined with ferocity. “You don’t need to worry about salts,” he argued. “I can last until we’re finished, the migraines aren’t bad enough that I can’t sleep through them.”

The king spotted another list above the one Tanton was bolding ( _despite_ Pitch’s reasonable argument) and noted that they seemed to be sleep remedies that were all slashed as failures. Working his jaw for a moment, Pitch felt an instinctual scowl pull at his forehead as he grudgingly gritted out, “If you’re having trouble sleeping, the Sandman usually tends to those sorts of problems.”

Tanton scoffed a little at the suggestion, and then when he glanced at Pitch, had the nerve to actually fucking laugh. “If you hate them so much then don’t advertise their services,” the wolf chuckled.

“I’m not advertising,” he grunted. “It’s merely an observation.”

“Ha, I’ll be alright. Hex has been dosing me up with chamomile, and honestly, I’d rather drink that shit than be the one who brings up the Guardians to Jack.”

Pitch just made a noncommittal, unperturbed noise in reply. He was honestly an expert, at this point, at shoving the general range of dark feelings Jack’s very name conjured into soundproof box before these memory tea sessions – after those first days of being so damn distracted by the spirit, this had been the only way to remain professional while doing such a delicate job.

And by the gods of this wretched planet, Pitch was most certainly a professional at this shit by now.

Back inside with an impatient group of patients, Tanton took to hanging sheets from the ceiling – in the way of the doorway, and in partitions around the room – as Pitch took note of the steam starting to rise from the burners and cracked open the barrel of tea leaves he and Tanton had almost emptied.

He stared for a second, down at the dark flecks of tea, and realised, distantly, “So this…?”

“Yup,” the werewolf said, bumping Pitch so he could scoop a large spoonful of the tea into a bowl, linen already draped around the room.

The Nightmare King replaced the lid of the barrel with a flat, “Oh.”

“You thought they were actually leaves, didn’t you?”

Pitch turned and glared at the grinning werewolf, and when a few others in the room snickered, he shot them dark looks as well. But then his eyes strayed back to the barrel and he couldn’t help but grimace, just a little. He wasn’t squeamish, not in the slightest, but still the idea of inhaling…

“Maybe gasmasks would have been a good idea,” the king muttered.

And Tanton just threw his hands up in the air in exasperation. “I _told_ you –!”

 

Systematically and swiftly, Pitch and Tanton annihilated their way through another wad of werewolves, poisoning and cleansing as Pitch cleaned their minds of the stains left behind by that monster.

_“Then you don’t remember the other thing I saw?”_

_“I do remember. Do you know what it was?”_

_“No.”_

Pitch dropped a wet towel onto the forehead of the wolf he’d just exited the mind of, and pushed his fingers into his eyes as an ache that was wholly unrelated to the tea began to throb into life behind his eyeballs.

_Damn spirit._

“Pitch!”

The king looked up at the sound of Skreeklavic’s voice, and his eyes cut to the right when he noticed that Tanton was giving him a look that screamed, “ _I’m giving you those smelling salts whether you want them or not!_ ”

Sighing, the man shoved the bowl of water at Tanton’s chest and moved through all the hanging linen in the way of the doorway. His clothes were damp with steam and clinging, if a little uncomfortably, so the coolness of the air outside was a welcomed relief, even if it came with a werewolf overlord stamping his good foot on the sidewalk, looking more than a little pissed and very impatient.

His guard rising, Pitch barely opened his mouth to ask the man what he wanted when Skreeklavic practically melted onto the king. “Pitch! Guess what horrible thing snuck in with the mail.”

_That damn card from Kikiyaon’s wife_ , would have been Pitch’s immediate response. But then the werewolf got a little too close to the king, and Pitch’s rising grumpiness waned as his brows dropped and he was confronted with the bundle Skreeklavic was clenching in his hand. “The newspaper?”

“The newspaper of my _nightmares_ , Pitch,” Skreeklavic cried, thrusting the paper at Pitch. “Read it.”

Dubiously taking the thing, Pitch’s eyes initially rolled when he noticed that it was from the Fae Empire – hadn’t Yves mentioned that his realm wasn’t a part of their domain? So why were they still trying to send him their newspapers? Fools – but then they narrowed when, on the very front page, he found what had upset Skreeklavic so thoroughly. “They’re going to bulldoze the fortress,” he said, if a little incredulously.

“Bulldoze!” the werewolf howled. “Like it’s some condemned building!”

Pitch scanned through the article, which was really nothing more than a giant photograph of Skreeklavic’s house flags getting burnt on a bonfire and bold letters announcing the ‘ _takeover and demolition of the fortress of the infamous Skreeklavic Shadowbent’_ by the Imperial army.

All the rest of the fine print was literally an ode to the majesty of the Imperial army, their garbage prowess and support for the continuity of the Court’s idiotic reign.

_The rebels must have provoked this_ , Pitch thought as he looked through a few more of the articles and noticed that none of the other main stories so much as mentioned the insurgents. _The Imperials are trying to save face._

Skreeklavic let out a genuinely angry growl and barked, “Give it here I wanna tear it apart.” Not really wanting to get eaten, Pitch gave the man back his newspaper and the esteemed overlord began hacking into it with his claws, shredding the paper and making a complete mess of himself and the sidewalk. “We’re going to slaughter those damn faeries,” he snarled. “Obviously not today, Tanton. But before they take any angle grinders to my downpipes.”

Pitch glanced to his left and saw that Tanton had emerged from the cottage, one hand parting the linens as he gave Skreeklavic a wary look. “Hey, uh, boss,” Tanton started cautiously, twitching a little when Skreeklavic bit into the paper with his fangs. “Did you consider that maybe this is just a trap? I mean, the fortress is pretty big. Why would they bother tearing it down when they could just keep it as a base?”

“Trap, shmap,” the overlord said, spitting out newspaper. “I ain’t letting no Imperials put their grubby little hands all over my stain glass windows.”

“Well, you know…”

“Don’t _say_ it, Tanton. I’m having a hard enough time as it is not barging in there whenever Yves shows me the fortress with Havið.”

“How savage,” Tanton muttered to Pitch, and the Nightmare King swore he heard Skreeklavic make a sound that was torn between agreeing madly and angrily defending Yves.

“Once you’re done,” Skreeklavic huffed once he’d finished having his fit, “let the other captains know what’s up. We’ll set out the day after everyone’s healed.”

“Got it, boss.”

“And Pitch, you’re invited too if you wanna smash some Imperial skulls together.”

The king stiffened at the invitation, and before he could convince himself that Skreeklavic’s war wasn’t any of his business, that it wasn’t the least bit his problem, he felt a quiet, bloodthirsty sort of appeal to the idea. “I’ll keep that in mind,” he promised, and Skreeklavic gave the man a hearty grin and one of those utterly unnecessary arm-slaps before waddling off, presumably to go and complain to Yves.

“Hey,” Tanton said with a fangy smile. “You’ll get to see the horde in action. Not just Yanov, Xani, and Clyde falling over themselves in a ring.”

Irked with the feeling that maybe Xani and Clyde’s impromptu showing that morning might have had some to do with the werewolf wearing a shit-eating grin in front of him, Pitch eyed the male. “Weren’t you just complaining that this might be a trap?”

Tanton shrugged. “If it’s a trap there’s not much we can do about it, right? And I bet the Imperials will be expecting us to knock on the front door, so we’ll have surprise on our side at least.”

Just as Pitch was about to ask whether this “surprise” was going to entail excessive and heavy-handed use of Yves’s skulls, a sudden shock of fear burst into the corner of his senses.

The king had barely turned his head before the fear was followed, half a heartbeat later, by a scream that cut through the entire realm, slicing air and stone and straight through Pitch’s composure.

_What_ –

  

* * *

 

 

Legging it through a forest he was getting to know a little too well, Jack came to the absent realisation that he was probably gonna fucking die soon.

Ideally, and probably with a misplaced dose of that optimism he’d been lacking for a while now, he hadn’t thought it would be this hard to achieve his goal and stay alive while he did it. In his perfect little imaginary world – painted, of course, but his cold ass rage – his scenario had played out quite well: Jack came, he conquered, and with the addition of the crow as a cool but ultimately useless sidekick, they returned to the realm triumphant and ready to change Pitch’s stupid attitude.

But of course, trying to wrangle a Nightmare was never gonna be exactly _easy_ , was it?

Soaring above his head, the crow gave a notifying caw – Jack had been out in the forest with the crow for so long now, honestly he wouldn’t be surprised if he could hold a full, intelligent conversation with the bird – and Jack promptly dove to his left, tumbling in the leaves and sticking himself close to a tree trunk.

The crow swung in hard to join Jack in the undergrowth, and not a heartbeat later, three screaming Nightmares tore straight past Jack’s tree, streaks of black through the half-dormant forest.

“Why is there so many of them?” Jack moaned to the crow, trying to catch his breath while he had the chance. “I just want one. _One_.  And why do they have to keep teaming up like that?”

The crow just stared at Jack, beady eyes judging, and the spirit groaned. “Yeah yeah, pack mentality. I can _see_ that. Ugh, these things smell fear don’t they, what the hell am I hiding for?”

He poked his head out from the tree, and noticed the trio of Nightmares sort of meandering their way back in Jack’s direction. The spirit shooed the bird off the ground and ran for it, keeping low to the ground because he was pretty sure there were sentinels floating above the treetops and fuck having another aerial battle with these things. Jack was agile in the air, but he wasn’t agile enough to take on dozens of Nightmares at once – especially if Boreas wanted to be a dick with the winds today as well.

Footsteps as silent as spiritually possible, Jack and the crow scoured through another patch of forest, careful to keep from snapping any twigs or thinking even remotely too hard about where exactly his determination had gotten him – because seriously, fear was the last thing he needed to be carrying right now. The Nightmares seemed to have little interest in the crow – damn bird – but Jack, on the other hand, they flocked to the moment even the slightest bit of anxiety fluttered through him.

_Probably not interested in chewing through feathers_ , the spirit figured, shooting the bird perched on a branch above him an annoyed look.

A rustle of leaves caught Jack’s attention, and the spirit dropped to the ground when he spied a lone Nightmare gliding past the trees up ahead. It was prowling with its head ducked down low, as if it was peering around at ground level, searching for a frost spirit too wary to take to the skies.

Trying to convince himself that the Nightmare’s intuition was not in the least bit terrifying – because fuck, was it ever – Jack gestured toward the sand horse with a nod of his head. “That one,” he whispered to his feathered sidekick.

The crow swooped down onto Jack’s shoulder (which was entirely too close to Jack’s eyeball for complete comfort, but desperate times called for desperate measures and Jack’s involuntary assistant was honestly probably the one reason he was still alive), and opened its beak as if it was going to caw some sort of response. Heart giving a brief, terrified thump, he grabbed the thing before it could make a sound loud enough to get them killed. “Shush,” he hissed, and the eyeing he got from the crow could have knocked a lesser man dead.

He glanced over toward the Nightmare, and breathed a sigh when he saw that its back was still to them, eyes peeled but otherwise unaware of them.

The bird shook Jack off indignantly, and the spirit started toward the Nightmare, knowing that it was better to act now while it was still alone rather than wait for a swarm to manifest again. He’d been reminded too many times already that swarms were decidedly _not_ fun, and if he ever got out of this shit alive, he was gonna smack Pitch for making so _many_ of these things.

“I’m not afraid of some badass sand,” he whispered as he inhaled a cooling breath. “Are you?” Jack glanced at the crow for hopefully a silent response this time, and smirked a little when the bird shook its entire body, spraying a few feathers onto the forest floor. “Awesome,” he laughed. “Let’s roll.”

The Nightmare Jack had targeted for his hunt was decidedly larger up close, but by the time Jack had noticed as much, the beast had snapped its head around and those cracked pits of gold widened at the sight of him.

“Not afraid of sand, not afraid of sand,” the spirit breathed, and before the Nightmare could make the first move, Jack was ducking low to the ground and bolting straight for the horse. The crow lifted off his shoulder, hanging back as the horse spun on the spirit. It might have seemed rash, but if he waited too long the Nightmare’s very presence would start to spook him, and it had taken Jack the better part of his time in this forest to work out as much and just get the hell over the hesitation he seemed to carry with him these days.

_Headfirst without thinking_ , he chanted as he threw his staff out and a curve of ice tore up from the ground, coiling up into the air and around Jack and the Nightmare. _Headfirst without thinking._

God, this used to come so _naturally_ to him.

When he was right in front of the Nightmare, Jack ducked out of the way of those open jaws and leapt for the open spiral of ice all around them. He planted his foot on a flat curve of ice and used it to propel himself to the other side of the spiral, pushing off from each side and gaining height until he was at the top of his little structure, head rustling against the sparse leaves still left on a nearby tree.

And before the Nightmare could fly up and kill him, Jack’s trusty sidekick came swooping through the gaps in the spiral, gliding in like a black demon and snapping at the Nightmare before dashing out again and returning from a different angle. The Nightmare, like the few others Jack and the crow had tried their routine on, obviously thought getting swooped by a big ass crow sucked, and soon enough it’s body began to shift as if it was getting ready to revert into a cloud of nightmare sand.

Expecting as much, the spirit aimed the staff down at the Nightmare and send a blast of cold, frigid air at the horse. It wasn’t enough to freeze it, not nearly enough to drive splinters through its sand body, but it was enough to shock the animal out of its escape plan. It glared up at Jack, hatred dancing all across its face as the crow got close enough to peck at its ear.

_I’d freeze it but I don’t want to kill it, and the winds would have been so freaking helpful right now but if Boreas sends another hail storm…_

The Nightmare looked about done with the bombardment, snapping at the crow and managing to catch a feather in its teeth that it promptly spat out. Predictably, the wuss of a crow didn’t come back into the little tower of ice again, and Jack shot another blast of air down at the Nightmare to distract it from doing anything annoying like calling for backup.

But this Nightmare was not interested, apparently, in needing help. And that really should have been Jack’s second warning, because before the spirit could dive for the Nightmare and grab it – the final stage of the plan, and the most horrifying, in Jack’s opinion – the Nightmare’s entire back half dissolved. Jack’s icy air hit the ground, and the spirit couldn’t even blink before the Nightmare was reformed and had rammed its body into the very sheet of ice that, a good fourteen feet into the air, Jack was hanging off of.

The force of the hit shattered the ice instantly, and Jack barely had time to call for some wind before he was falling and the Nightmare was darting off the ground for him.

The wing caught Jack before he could become Nightmare food, and with a hair’s breadth of space between them, Jack slid beneath the rising Nightmare’s legs, barely skimming its ribs with his staff.

But, far from clearing the horse safely, the Nightmare made an angry sound somewhere in its nostrils, and just as Jack’s feet hit the ground, he felt something sharp and sandy slash over his shoulder.

He jumped out of his skin at the contact, spinning to ward off any teeth. But the pain vanished quickly, and Jack realised, blearily, that the Nightmare still had its back to him. He had only been hit by the horse’s tail.

On the verge of being relieved that it wasn’t a fucking hoof or something, the Nightmare spun and Jack had just braced himself for another run at the thing – he was nothing if not tenacious – when he felt something awful spread through his shoulder, and then curl over his neck and down his spine.

“Oh shit,” he whispered, grabbing at it. “ _Shit_.”

The Nightmare charged at him, and Jack called a swift wind to toss him into the nearest tree. In a panic, he checked under his hoodie only to start swearing again when he saw the black splodges across his skin.

The crow rocked up a moment later, looking less than impressed at having involuntarily lost a feather, and Jack bodily sagged against the tree. “It’s one of the leaders,” he groaned. “We should have gone for a smaller one.”

The mentioned leader, down on the ground, snorted up at Jack, and the spirit peered over the side of his branch just in time to see the thing charge up at him.

Narrowly managing not to scream, the spirit dumped himself off the branch, sending a gust of icy wind through the entire canopy to make sure the crow was following suit. Jack hit the ground and the crow swooped past his head just as the Nightmare ploughed into the branch the spirit had just been standing on, splintering the wood in a cloud of angry sand before curling around the base of the tree and reappearing only to glare down at Jack.

It was beginning to kick up its front hooves, scraping them through the air like a normal horse would through dirt, and frankly as an intimidation method it was working very well.

So well, in fact, that the crow decided it was time to bounce.

“Where are you going?” Jack hissed at it, only to be ignored as the crow flapped off into the trees. “Get back here, we’re holding our ground!” But it was too late – his sidekick had abandoned him, and now Jack was left alone with an angry Nightmare. The poisoned skin on his shoulder began to crawl and Jack felt over it to make sure his flesh wasn’t actually moving. “Ugh, _birds_.”

Exhaling what he hoped was a trickle of his bubbling anxiety, Jack gripped his staff a little tighter and turned back toward the tree the Nightmare was coiled around like a decoration made of livid, dark, murderous, _death._ “Okay, _look_ , I know we might have –”

But the Nightmare was no longer in the tree. Stomaching dropping, Jack spun and spun and spun, trying to catch even the slightest glimpse of the thing before it came up behind him and –

Weight slammed into Jack’s back, exploding across his spine and ribcage at first as a terrible, propelling impact, and then as millions of grains of sand. The spirit was thrown forward into the leaves and dirt as a nauseating wave of terror stabbed claws into the flesh of his back, curling around his vertebrae as if it wanted to just pull –

“Ngh, no _no_ –” The spirit grunted, trying to regain some strength as he forced his body to move. Black danced behind him, caught out of the corner of his eye, and the spirit raised a wall of thick ice between himself and the Nightmare.

_I have to get out of here before the rest come_ , the spirit thought furiously, fingers digging into the dirt as he pushed himself to his feet. The fear coursing through his back and his shoulder, the sickening bubbling of his skin and the awful burrowing of the claws, was so stomach-turning the spirit vomited as soon as he was upright.

_No gold. Thank god. But ugh, I have to run –_

Cutting off any single hope Jack might have had, the Nightmare he had so poorly chosen to hassle decided that now would be a good time to call for reinforcements.

The spirit threw his arms over his ears as the Nightmare’s scream tore through the forest, panic and fear rippling through his body. Somewhere through the sound, though, a distant part of him that was still able to be even remotely incredulous had him muttering, “Oh no you didn’t.”

He had just lifted his arms away from his head when a returning lot of screams cut back toward them, like a collection of horrifying echoes, and Jack’s shoulders dropped as his throat went dry.

_No. No, if I freeze up they’ll be here and I’ll be as good as dead. I’ve gotta fucking man up._

Wiping the dirt and saliva from the side of his mouth, Jack turned back to the wall of ice he’d made and smacked it with the end of his staff.

The ice crumbed into light snow, revealing a hellbent Nightmare that looked, in Jack’s opinion, a little too pleased with itself.

_Now or never_ , he told himself, nervousness tearing through his veins.

So for the last time, Jack took a breath and ran for the Nightmare head on, picking up into a sprint that had the Nightmare bracing itself, nostrils flaring and sand muscles tensing.

But instead of going high, Jack got close enough to the massive thing for the Nightmare to scream at him – and for the spirit to scream back because fear and adrenaline do not make for a quiet battle.  He threw an arc of thick ice around the Nightmare’s shoulder blades, holding it down when the horse tried to rear up, and the spirit followed the ice up onto the Nightmare’s back. His legs touched the black sand, ankles blooming with poison and calves darkening with fear. His entire body stiffened for a terrified moment before Jack cracked his muscles out of their fabricated fear and threw his staff across the horse’s huge throat so he wouldn’t be immediately thrown off.

The Nightmare bucked, screamed and thrashed and Jack’s back hit the arc of ice and broke it clean in half, the breath punching out of his chest from the impact.

But he couldn’t let go – he couldn’t – not until –

He refilled his lungs and, above the screaming of the encroaching Nightmares, yelled a hoarse, “ANYTIME YOU WANNA COME BACK WITH THAT SKULL –”

And thank fuck, the crow’s cowardice hadn’t been absolute. Before Jack had even finished his plea, the black bird was descending onto the spirit and the spinning, thrashing horse. It tossed a perfectly aimed tiny skull beneath the hoof of the Nightmare, and the next time the horse stamped its powerful shoes, plumes of smoke exploded around them and a large pair of talons settled on Jack’s stiff back.

As the familiar smoke wafted around them, sucking the Nightmare, Jack, and the crow through the folds of space, Jack was beside himself. He could feel the Nightmare’s poison leeching through nearly every inch of his skin, pouring beneath the layers of tissue and muscle and forcing into his blood the kind of grating, choking terror that fed blood curdling screams.

That fed, well, Nightmares.

And it was so potent, so _petrifying_ , that he didn’t even close his eyes as his was blinded by all sides, as the screams of the other Nightmares were erased. He _couldn’t_. The Nightmare under him was still trying to buck him off and it was doing a fucking great job of it – Jack had witnessed a few humans die because of situations like this, and honestly, if the Nightmare did one of those black-slams onto the ground Jack would end up flat as a pancake and wouldn’t that make a fucking _mess_ –

Lights flickered through the dark purple smoke, like blooms of white behind closed eyelids, and the Nightmare made a furious sound as it tried to dematerialise in the smoke but apparently couldn’t.

And then the smoke was dissolving, the crow on Jack’s back peeling off with a loud caw. The Nightmare let loose a scream so powerful Jack’s felt it reverberate through the horse’s entire body. Fear cramped the spirit’s hand and his grip slipped on his staff just enough for the Nightmare to give another almighty buck and throw Jack through the air and into a poorly placed pumpkin.

He immediately rolled out of the way of a pair of hooves about to smash into his face, and as soon as the Nightmare’s scream died, he automatically yelled for the only person he knew would help him no matter what.

_“It’s you and me, Frost._ _I’ve got you, I’ll do fucking anything for you….”_

_“You’ve always trusted me, Frost.”_

“PHOENIX!”

And luck, thank fuck, just so happened to have placed Phoenix right by the tree line, apparently in the middle of a romantic stroll in the woods with Lani and Clyde before Jack had returned to ruin his day once again.

The fire spirit’s eyes went wide at the sight of the Nightmare (Clyde’s jaw had already dropped in shock, and Lani was beginning to frown) and Jack saw the fire spirit begin to curse, bundling Lani up and handing her to Clyde with an incredulous, “ – take Lani, holy fuck I can’t believe –”

After that Jack was too busy scrambling to his feet and trying to stop the Nightmare from flying away (with well-placed bursts of ice, which only seemed to make the Nightmare more furiously frustrated) to really take note if Phoenix was cursing him as he approached or not. He was also trying his hardest not to throw up again purely from the nausea caused by the poison – a nausea which, thankfully, lessened a little when the fire spirit peeled in front of Jack and held up two hands to the Nightmare like one would an actual spooked horse.

“Whoa, girl.”

Jack and Phoenix both leapt to either side when two hooves came smashing back down into the earth again, and with flames lighting up his palms, Phoenix drew the Nightmare’s attention away from Jack for a few precious moments.

Wherein the frost spirit was cussed at, furiously. “Frost, what the _fuck_. What the actual holy –”

The fire spirit nearly slipped on the squished pumpkin house, and Jack’s heart hammered painfully. “Phoenix –,” he began nervously, and the Nightmare’s head whipped back around to him. Phoenix had to yell at the horse to get its attention again.

Which promptly resulted in the fire spirit getting charged at.

“Phoenix, _move_ ,” Jack shouted, and cut a wall of ice between the Nightmare and the spirit before returning to shooting bursts of ice in the way of the mad aerial dashes the Nightmare was trying to escape with. “Don’t let it touch you –” he glanced over at Phoenix for a single second and twitched when he saw the spirit examining a black smudge running all along his wrist “– yeah, that’s why. Shit, just help me.”

Exhaling a shaken breath, Phoenix looked at Jack, then at the Nightmare that was back on the ground and looking around for an alternative escape route. In a tone that had grown a little sober, maybe a little warier, the fire spirit asked, “What’s the plan?”

“Stables,” Jack croaked. “I can make a path, but the Nightmare’s gonna need some nudging.”

Phoenix looked like he wanted to roast him. “Fucking _nudging_ – I’m gonna kill you, Frost.”

“Do it afterwards.”

Before the Nightmare could try another escape feint, Jack threw his staff in another arc and blasted ice as thick as igloo bricks in an arch behind it. As Phoenix waved his poisoned hand in front of the Nightmare’s face and distracted the horse for good few seconds, Jack clambered his way to the top of the arch and began to build it along the fields and into the forest, creating a tunnel that was hopefully thick enough to withstand its angry passenger.

“You ready?” he yelled down at Phoenix.

With a grunt, the fire spirit spread his arms wide and a curve of flames spread between both of his palms, curling up past his head and down along the soil. The Nightmare huffed angrily at the sight of the fire, but when Phoenix began to corral the horse with it, backing the Nightmare toward the mouth of the tunnel with fire above and below, wariness won out over courage and Jack looked down through the ice and saw a smudge of black beneath his feet.

The Nightmare kicked up at the roof of the tunnel, nearly throwing Jack off the structure, and smashed its body into the thick ice walls. But the ice was thick enough to withstand the beating, and as soon as Jack confirmed as much, he began to skate along the top to finish the rest of the path.

“It’s startin’ to melt, Frost!”

“I’m on it!” Jack yelled, propelling himself along the ice with the help of some conjured wind until the forest and the unfinished part of his tunnel came into sight. “Just give me a –”

A blur of black bolted beneath Jack’s feet, and with a panicked curse the spirit automatically threw more ice ahead of him, speeding himself up until he was skating right above the sprinting Nightmare. The forest rushed past them trees blurring and undergrowth freezing, and Jack kept his staff sliding along the ice just ahead of him, pouring ice that curved around tree trunks and rotting stumps.

The Nightmare gave the tunnel another full-body smash as Jack forced it around a particularly thick tree, and the spirit felt fear scratch at him a little too roughly when he saw the ice crack deeply.

 But the fault would be fine – it wasn’t like the Nightmare could wait around and exploit it considering a giant ass fireball was following the thing through the tunnel. He could hear it’s approach in his wake, cracking and melting the tunnel behind him, and nervousness had Jack trying to keep one eye on the racing Nightmare, another on the trees, and then _another_ on how quickly the fire was coming to meet them from behind.

Which was, understandably, a fucking problem – made even worse when the very idea of a third eye emerging from somewhere on his body only made horror peel over his skin and the Nightmare he was trying to escort kick up into a frenzy.

A shred of relief, though, came with the end of the forest and the sight of Yves’s stables. Jack had the giant sliding doors smashed open on a violent gust of wind, and in the very room Jack had decided that this would be a good idea, he sealed the end of the tunnel over the entrance to one of the larger stalls. The Nightmare had little choice but to complain loudly and crash into the confines of the stall, sending an inkling of guilt through the spirit for all of a heartbeat before he felt heat approach and had to slam thick, impenetrable ice beneath his feet to clog up the rest of the tunnel.

Phoenix’s fire, when it arrived in a barrage of rolling heat and flame, melted through half of Jack’s giant block of ice before fizzling out just as it reached the spirit’s feet. He swallowed anxiously as the heat that had licked at his feet faded, and when the Nightmare gave another angry roar, he smacked the still-standing side of the tunnel and sealed off the end of the channel, trapping the Nightmare within the stall.

When the spirit spotted Phoenix stomping through the tree line not a moment later, he uttered, “Wasn’t that a little overkill?” and pointed to the scorch marks left on the stable floor.

“Oh, you wanna talk to me about bad decisions?” Phoenix grumbled at him, twitching when the Nightmare screeched. “ _Really_?”

Conceding that maybe the guy had a point, Jack tapped the block of ice he was standing on with his staff and the inferno-buffer along with the rest of the tunnel in the stables crumbled. The spirit dropped a good eight feet onto a bed of soft snow, and promptly collapsed onto it.

“ _Frost_.”

Jack squeezed his eyes shut when a pair of fiery eyes entered his vision. “Please not yet,” he begged. “Thank you for helping me but please don’t give me the talk yet.”

“I can’t believe I associate with you,” the fire spirit muttered, and Jack cracked his eyes open enough to notice him full-body flinch when the Nightmare kicked at the ice blocking its way out.

A flinch Jack mirrored a moment later when he heard the ice fracture.

Snapping into an upright position – a little too fast, if the way his stomach rolled was any indication – Jack aimed his staff at the blockade of ice and felt positively ill when nothing but a puff of icy air materialised in front of him.

_Is it because of all the fear? Shit._

“Ugghhh,” he groaned, and staggered to his feet so he could crawl all the way over to where the Nightmare was thrashing and stab his staff into the ice creeping out from the bottom of the stall door.

New frost healed over the cracks in the ice, and Jack leaned his head against his staff as he tried to convince his bones not to slip from beneath his muscle and run for it.

_Please don’t put a hoof through the ice and brain me. Please don’t splinter through the wood and eat me. Ngh,_ god _, I just have to keep icing this opening and –_

“Shit.”

Jack looked at Phoenix, and as soon as he saw the pinched expression on the fire spirit’s face, his stomach dropped and he whirled toward the doorway.

Dark silhouette against the bright light outside, stood a king who was staring at the Nightmare trying to break through the ice like he couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing. A man whose hands were twitching at his sides, like his mind wasn’t processing but his body definitely was and it wanted something to _maim_. Luminescent eyes that fell to Jack and focused so intensely that pure terror scrape down the spirit’s spine.

The ice pouring into the barricade spluttered, as did Jack’s heart, and he had nothing but his staff to hold onto like a lifeline as the Nightmare’s poison under his skin began to devour the last few ounces of his courage.

 

* * *

 

Five minutes ago, Pitch had been ready to brush off their earlier argument as one of Jack’s frequent whiplash-causing mood swings – and by “brush off” he of course meant “store away to be used as fodder for when he finally regained some common sense and needed some rage-inducing memories to feed his quest of vengeance and world domination”.

But _this_ … there was a _Nightmare_ , screaming and thrashing behind a breaking wall of ice – a wall of ice constantly being mended by the dirty, mussed, trembling spirit in front of it – and Pitch was literally torn between disbelief, fury, and actual _fear_.

The realization of which just made him even _more_ furious.

“Okay, this is a nope from me,” the fire spirit said, and when the male tried to creep around Pitch to get out of the stables, one look from the Nightmare King had him falling into a crate in fright. “Fuck!” he exclaimed, sparks of fire bursting from his hands as he scrambled out of the stables. “What the fuck…”

The fire spirit’s semi-confused and mostly terrified voice retreated into the woods, taking with it the black, shadowy spikes of fear that were punching through every inch of the spirit’s skin, and Pitch’s eyes tracked back to cause of all his current problems.

The cause in question twitched under Pitch’s stare, the fear he was being engulfed by obviously potent enough to have him trembling at the very sight of the Nightmare King. The blooming colours, the breaking objects, the revolting formations – they were all fabricated in most places, and Pitch could have deduced as much without even sensing the poison. But in other places the fears were very real, very raw, and Pitch’s sadism longed to just punch fingers into the spirit’s chest and see if he could make those fears _bleed_.

_But I won’t. Not yet._

Because Pitch’s mind was turning over, anger granting clarity in a way that it hadn’t for a true while. He was furious, beyond furious, but his gait was calm as he approached Jack, his voice even – if a little darker than usual – as he asked, “ _Why_.”

Jack shivered, eyes flickering between the approaching king and the Nightmare slamming against the ice behind him. “I told you why,” he rasped. “They’re –”

“No,” he interrupted, and Jack flinched when he looked at Pitch and noticed how close the king had gotten. “Why are you so bothered by this all? So _dedicated_ that you’d put yourself through _this_ –” he ran deceptively gentle fingers down the poisoned skin on Jack’s neck, managing to apply only the barest hint of pressure despite the bloodlust that was screaming at him to do _more_ , yet still the spirit whimpered and shuddered “– for _that_.”

Without letting go of the spirit, his eyes flickered up to the furious Nightmare now staring down through the ice at the two of them, and Pitch had to work hard to stop his fingers from clenching on Jack’s throat.

Fear stunting the spirit’s ability to answer, Pitch’s eyes dropped back to Jack as he let his hand wander up the side of the spirit’s neck. _He’s shaking like a leaf_ , the king noted mildly. _But he’s still standing there icing the stall closed so the idiot must still have a morsel of bravery left._

Pity.

“Is this because of you?”

Jack flinched at the accusation, eyes widening in alarm, but Pitch wasn’t taking any notice of his reactions. The fear in Jack’s body was so _thick_ the king doubted it would provoke any sort of honest physical response, so he just stuck to keeping his eyes on Jack’s chest. He watched terror form and fade with the intention of finding something that would affirm the suspicion he’d formulated during their last argument.

_You can pick a good fight, Jack, but you’re not the only one here who’s observant._

“Is this because of the Moon,” the Nightmare King murmured.

The spirit looked like he wanted to throw up, and Pitch let go of Jack’s throat in case the male actually tried to. “I’m not that selfish –,” he started to croak, but his chest was betraying him, and Pitch’s gaze zeroed in on a particularly guilty looking – and very old – fear.

Pale, colourless images flashed, then bubbled as if falling through deep water. Pitch’s eyes narrowed and he cut the spirit off mid-lie, “And I’m not stupid enough to believe that you’re doing this with some righteous ideal in mind.”

Behind Jack, the Nightmare smashed against the ice again, sending a dangerously deep fissure through the glistening wall. Pitch didn’t so much as flinch – he was feeling enough apprehension about this whole situation as it was, he didn’t need the Nightmare seeing any outward display of it – and reminded himself that his scythe was literally a roll and a half away from him.

Jack, on the other hand, threw his hands over his head in a panic and quickly spun back to the ice to mend it before the whole wall broke.

Inhaling a rattling breath, the spirit murmured shakily, “So what if it does?”

Pitch’s eyes narrowed, and when Jack finally turned to look at him, there was a flicker of a very cold fire in his stare. “The Moon ignored me for a hundred years, hid behind clouds for the next fifty, then showed its face in front of me only to remain silent until it wanted something from me.” The spirit swallowed, eyes darting away as he added in barely a whisper, “How is it fair to create something and leave it in this world to fend for itself all alone.”

Neither the tremor in the spirit’s voice, nor the desolation he could see in Jack’s expression touched Pitch. He wouldn’t let either affect him, not when empathy only made him weaker.

And besides, Pitch didn’t fucking care if it was fair or not. _Nothing_ was fair. And the very fact that Jack was trying to push this onto Pitch made the Nightmare King begin to regret ever agreeing to be amicable with the spirit.

An exasperated stare snapped up to the Nightmare for a moment, and Pitch exhaled an angry, tired breath before turning and starting for crates on the other side of the room. “It wasn’t by choice, they turned on me –”

He was stopped, though, by a spirit who could barely stand, staff in front of him like he was ready to fight the man he was so clearly terrified of. “But you always knew that could happen!” Jack yelled at him, a confidence in his voice, a desperation in his expression, that had Pitch stopping cold for a moment.

Then anxiety flickered through Jack’s chest, and the spirit’s voice broke hesitantly as he added, “ _Right_? You always knew that, right? Your power goes both ways, so the Nightmares are like double-edged swords but you _made_ _them_ _like_ _that_.”

“Of course I knew that,” Pitch snapped, swooping in at Jack so quickly the spirit panicked and ducked out of his way.

He heard Jack curse and as soon as Pitch reached for his scythe, his arm was shoved away by the determined blond. “They’re _yours_. They know you created them. And the more you try to fight them, the more they’re going to hate you.”

Pitch laughed at the absurdity of what the spirit was saying – at the whole situation he was in, in fact. “They don’t have _respect_. I made them as creatures that –”

“They do!” Jack cried, barely audible over the background noise of the Nightmare screaming. “They _do_ ,” he insisted, trembling as Pitch’s gaze intensified and the scream ricocheted off the wooden walls. “And – and if it’s not exactly respect, then it’s loyalty. They’re loyal to each other now that you left them, so you’ve gotta win it back. Win _them_ back, before you try and use your shadows again and something worse happens than you just falling into a wall.”

Disbelief cut into the cloud of rage Pitch was experiencing, and his pride reared up and shoved his bloodlust out of the way so it could roar into his earhole.

_The spirit really does have a death wish_ , the king thought, his arm snapping out and grabbing the stupid male by his jumper before he even gave the limb the command. _How enlightening._

Over on the other side of the room, the ice splintered once again, and Jack tried to claw Pitch’s hand off him to get back over to it. “Ugh, let me –”

“Let it escape,” Pitch said coldly, earning a wide-eyed look from the spirit. “You can watch your heartfelt effort of spreading fairness throughout the world get decapitated.”

Icy eyes narrowed. “I’ll defend it if I have to,” Jack bit back.

“Then I’ll take you with it,” Pitch snarled.

The spirit bodily flinched away from his threat, and as fucking angry as he was, Pitch let up a little when he realised that didn’t actually know if he was pleased by the sight of the fear. He _should_ have been. As the Nightmare King, it should have made him very, very happy.

And yet – and yet he was so used to Jack holding his ground whenever Pitch yelled at him that this was more than a little disconcerting.

_Off-putting._

“And then what?” the spirit eventually managed, dragging his eyes up to meet Pitch’s again. “You might fucking die Pitch if you don’t change something. Hunting them will only make you safe for so long, but then what? What kind of Nightmare King are you gonna be without any shadows?”

The jab hit harder than it should have, and Pitch shoved Jack back into the crates behind him. The scythe clattered to the floor loudly. “Don’t underestimate me.”

“I’m being realistic!” Jack yelled, leaping forward and shoving the Nightmare King back. “ _You’re making me be realistic_.”

A growl rolled through Pitch’s throat. “It’s none of your business whether I’m –”

“WHY CAN’T IT BE?” Jack shouted, so loud that the Nightmare paused in its incessant pounding, so cutting that Pitch’s growl died somewhere on his tongue. The spirit ran shaking fingers through his hair and choked, “I hate the shadows but seeing you in pain sucks so _much_. So why can’t you just let me help you too?”

The spirit’s words bit into Pitch’s flesh like serrated blades, gliding in easier than they tore out and leaving something of a collection of gory wounds that the Nightmare King’s impulses – his bloodlust, his pride, all of them – tried desperately to fill and to patch before they could cause any sort of catastrophic leak.

But then the damn spirit looked at him, icy eyes _begging_ , and Pitch felt his rage bleed right out of his system.

_Fuck_ , he mentally breathed, eyes rolling back into his head as he heard the ice crack again. I _don’t need the help._

_I don’t want it, and I don’t damn well need it._

His chest stung, as if providing him with a counter argument, and the king thoughtlessly pressed his fingers against the pain. His eyes opened and he glared down at the spirit whose attention was once again fixed on the breaking ice, shivering in nervousness and riddled with anxiety that he had given himself.

For _Pitch’s_ sake.

_Maybe I do,_ the king amended silently, dropping his hand just in time for the ice to finally shatter.

Jack made a startled noise, a shriek of some sorts that seemed to choke off in his throat as he leapt between Pitch and the freed Nightmare.

_I threaten him, and still his first instinct is to protect me_ , Pitch thought as an old sort of pain stabbed at him. The Nightmare hadn’t left the stall yet, obviously not stupid enough to charge at a frost spirit and Pitch in such a confined space, and Pitch stared at the back of Jack’s head for a moment, at the leaves and twigs and black feathers caught in the white strands.

_Maybe I do need this._

Anxiety spiked in the spirit, but before the Nightmare could work up the nerve to attack them, emerald vines shot out from beneath the concrete floor of the stables, punching through the ground and tearing up to the ceiling. The vines wove and wove and wove until they were knotted and tangled, creating a living wall in place of the ice. The Nightmare took one look at the green matted mess and tried to seep through a hole only for the vine to clamp shut on it and send the horse recoiling with an angry cry.

Jack heaved an audible sigh of relief, his whole body practically melting into the floor, and Pitch’s eyes darted to the figure leaning against the stable door.

“ _Yves_ ,” Jack breathed a moment later, dashing past Pitch with barely a look at the man, “you’re here, good, that’s – I need to go. And _hide_.”

Yves gave the spirit an unimpressed look as Jack ambled up to him. “I will wash those clothes for you, bony Jack. Leave them in the bathroom once you are done picking those twigs out of your hair.”

Fear flared in Jack’s ribcage. “Small bathroom,” the spirit murmured, passing the man.

Yves rolled his eyes. “It is not that small.”

“The walls move.”

“The walls do not move.”

“They do,” Jack whispered solemnly, and in the back of Pitch’s mind, he felt the hint of genuine unease Jack’s words held.

_That better just be his claustrophobia talking_ , Pitch thought as the Nightmare made another loud noise of disapproval. He shot the thing a deadly look, to which the Nightmare seemed to just sneer in reply from behind its vined cage. Pitch’s hands clenched in irritation.

Behind him, Yves’s eyes narrowed sharply. “Bony Jack,” he said firmly, and Jack reluctantly turned back to the king. “I have expressly told my house not to harm you. It will not defy me. Do you believe me?”

Jack stared at Yves for a long moment, eyes darting to Pitch’s figure in the stables and then back again, before nodding slowly.

The Nightmare King kept one eye on the spirit as he wandered off, following the trail of scorched and wet ground back to the house, before letting his attention settle wholly on Yves.

His pride twitching, he gritted, “If you have something to say, please spit it out.”

But Yves apparently wasn’t in the mood for poking, and instead he was casting his gaze over the Nightmare huffing as it paced in the stall. “I never imagined my stables would be put to use again,” he seemed to muse aloud, and Pitch couldn’t tell if his tone was wistful or deeply unhappy.

“This wasn’t my idea,” he uttered.

Yves nodded. “I know. Jack’s whims can be… challenging.”

_Challenging’s one way to put it._ Pitch dragged his fingers through the back of his hair and, feeling less than up to testing out his fighting resolve just yet, stalked past Yves and out of the stables. “I’ll get it out once I’m done with the wolves,” he promised flatly.

He opted to ignore the amused, “ _Hmm_ ,” he received in reply.

Much like it had on Halloween, Yves’s house had turned into a little gift basket of terror by the time Pitch emerged from the forest. From halfway across the fields, he could see Jack pacing through the upper story, his fear bright and clear and _polluting_ in a way that had Pitch’s hunger positively salivating. He also noticed that downstairs was looking just as contaminated, although not nearly as deliciously so.

In fact, the fear lingering downstairs, emanating from an irritating fire spirit reclined on the sofa in the living room, was rather much annoying, and so Pitch decided he’d go clean that mess up first.

Waltzing into the living room with barely a breath of noise, Pitch’s eyes narrowed when he saw the fire spirit examining the wrist covered in poison. With little patience, Pitch kicked the sofa violently. “Give me your hand,” he demanded as the fire spirit floundered.

One foot off the sofa and half his body cranked toward Pitch, Phoenix bit a nasty and very scared, “Fuck off.”

Rolling his eyes, Pitch walked around the back of the sofa, and before Phoenix could try anything heroic, he shoved the fire spirit in the face, smushing his head into the arm of the lounge, and grabbed hold of his stained wrist.

Since Pitch’s life was never easy, the fire spirit started to yell like Pitch was _actually_ murdering him – which was, of course, _ridiculous_ because if the king really had come to kill the idiot, the fire spirit would be a corpse before he could swallow even a breath of air – and Pitch absorbed the poison as quickly as he could. His concentration was at critical levels as he breathed through the heat quickly rising to the surface of Phoenix’s wrist, as he breathed through the irritating _flailing_ that made him regret ever detouring down here, yet still the fire spirit’s skin heated to well beyond painful before Pitch had finished.

He’d barely let go before the idiot’s entire arm caught on fire, and Pitch had to take a large step back lest his shirt get a hole burnt through it.

Phoenix rolled off the sofa, arm extinguishing and rising to be used as some sort of shield in case a battle took place in Yves’s lounge room. The king immediately noted that the poison seemed to be gone, along with the majority of the fire spirit’s prickling fear. Phoenix seemed to work this out himself a moment later.

The fire spirit’s gratitude, however, obviously came in the form of cursing. “Fuck!” Phoenix yelled. “You fucking – oh, hey, that actual feels better.”

Shaking his hand out with a harsh mutter, Pitch turned and went to stalk out of the room when the fire spirit looked up from the wrist he was prodding at and called, “Hey, asshole.”

Pitch stopped at the threshold and rolled his eyes back to the irritant. Phoenix just grinned at him and snarked, “How do you like Frost’s mood swings?”

_I think I like this idiot better when he’s terrified of me._

The king’s eyes narrowed, and the grin grew wider. Sharper. “Fun, aren’t they? Feel like fucking off out of our lives yet?”

Pitch flexed his throbbing hand as he stared the fire spirit down. _Is it jealousy?_ he wondered for a moment. _Or did I scare the shit out of him once upon a time and he’s still holding a grudge?_

A very large part of him wanted to terrify the fire spirit into fessing up an answer, but his peripheral senses were picking up on Jack’s bundle of fears moving upstairs, and he began losing interest in the current conversation startlingly quickly. He also thought the goading of a cockroach wasn’t worth his time, so he just turned his back on the spirit and started through the kitchen.

“Keep your hands off Frost,” Phoenix barked at him.

Pitch just scoffed at the order, and when he swung around with piercing eyes, Phoenix stopped dead in the doorway. “Being told not to touch something makes me just want to break it.”

Phoenix’s eyes widened in anger. “I’ll fucking kill you!” he shouted, but the spirit was all bark and no bite, and Pitch stalked through the kitchen without a fireball chasing him.

“I’ve heard that one before,” he muttered as he headed up the stairs. Somewhere below him, he heard the fire spirit curse loudly as he slammed open the back door and stormed out of the house, and Pitch was a little relieved that he wouldn’t have to throw down with the combustible male in the cramped staircase.

But only a little. Mostly, he was just annoyed that the fire spirit went out of his way so often to threaten Pitch, but never stuck around long enough to actually fight the man.

_If I crush him like an insect, he might actually shut up for ten minutes. But he’s never given me the chance to._

And he was starting to wonder if it was because Phoenix was oh so scared of him, or if it had something to do with the frost spirit Pitch could see hiding in the corner of the room the king had temporarily moved into.

Y _ou spend the night in your fire spirit’s room_ , the king mused as he literally had to crack the door open to his room. _Yet when you’re so scared, you come to mine._

Ice fell from around the doorframe, clattering to the floorboards under Pitch’s boots. The king took note of the frost that was scattered over the bed and the trunk Pitch had brought his clothes in, the sprinkling that was creeping up the side of the shivering wardrobe.

Then his gaze settled on the large clumps of ice set up like pikes around the spirit huddled in the corner of the room.

Spying the staff lying across the bed, Pitch exhaled a foggy breath as he entered the room. _He really needs to relearn how to control this before he kills someone for spooking him._

Ice crystals broke under Pitch’s boot, and frozen eyes snapped to the king. Two orbs of bright blue peered out from beneath the arms Jack had covering his head and the back of his neck, and for a startling moment, Pitch was reminded of a wounded animal.

With his instincts telling him that he probably wasn’t too far off the mark, the king raised his hands in a placating gesture as he eased through the room.

The door clicked closed behind Pitch – Jack’s doing, the king dearly hoped, otherwise he was going to start sleeping outside – but he didn’t dare spare it a glance. The spirit still had his eyes hooked into Pitch’s skin, and every step he took forward, Jack seemed to tense a little more, as if he was preparing himself to bolt.

_He’s already nervous enough from being in such a small room_ , Pitch thought as he rounded the bedpost and sat himself on the frosted quilt. The king gave the huddled spirit a quick once over and mildly added, _Although it’s not like he can go very far clad only in a shirt._

Jack’s eyes darted from Pitch to his staff, to the window and then back to Pitch again, and the Nightmare King sighed.

_This would’ve been easier if I still had my anger_ , the king thought as he went to rest his chin on his hand. _I could’ve just petrified the spirit, absorbed the poison and been on my way. Now I suspect it’s going to be like coaxing a skittish animal into accepting food._

Mindlessly, his chin touched the tender skin that had been nearly burnt by the damn fire spirit, and Pitch twitched back instantly, a harsh movement that Jack’s attention snapped to.

Then he got an idea.

“My hand hurts,” the king suddenly announced. Jack flinched back at the sound of his voice in the quiet, cold space, but the jolt didn’t deter Pitch in the least. Especially since Jack’s eyes began to inspect – from a distance, of course – Pitch’s raised palm in obvious concern.

“I took the poison out of your fire spirit’s wrist,” Pitch explained, holding out his hand, “and his skin was hotter than I anticipated. I could do with a little ice, if you would.”

_You would go so far out of your way to help me, Jack, such a simple request should be impossible to deny. You’ve done this for me before, you can do it again._

It took a quiet moment, but slowly, warily, Jack peeled himself out of the safety of his ice. The white top he wore was a long one, but since he was still bare from the waist down there was a lot of naked skin on display as Jack shakily wandered toward the king.

A lot of naked skin that was bruised a dark, shadowy black.

_She really did a number on him_ , Pitch thought unhappily, taking note that Jack had tried to ice over some of the darker parts of the poison.

He kept his hand perfectly still as Jack approached him, and a good three feet away from the king, Jack reached for the limb Pitch had extended, gaze fixed on the slightly darkened flesh.

But before he could so much as touch it, Pitch pulled his palm back, just a little.

Jack froze, and amongst the fears cascading over the spirit’s skin, Pitch picked up on an anxiety he’d seen before. “I’m not mad,” he said truthfully, and Jack looked at him warily.

“You were,” the spirit rasped.

“I –” Pitch sighed, and he just stared at Jack for a moment, standing there in nothing but white cotton as he rubbed trembling fingers over his forearms. Trying to make his voice as soft as possible, the king promised, “I’m not anymore.”

When Jack’s fingers just buried themselves in the sleeves of his top, the spirit’s teeth digging into his lip nervously, Pitch’s gaze dropped to the visible fear blistering over pale white legs. He remembered having those legs wrapped around his waist, thin but firm and so devastatingly persuasive.

His eyes rose to the spirit’s exposed throat, the poison he’d prodded at earlier and the stained collarbone exposed by the low neck of the top. “You did all of this for me, didn’t you?” he asked in a murmur. Jack nodded, gaze wavering skittishly until Pitch held his hand out again. “Can you do this too?”

The spirit’s shoulders trembled slightly, hesitantly, but after another quiet moment he moved in a fraction closer.

And closer.

And closer.

Until Pitch’s hand was hovering near his shoulder, and Jack, obviously in spite of the fear he was being overwhelmed by, was standing between the king’s legs and tentatively reaching for the limb, one eye on Pitch like he still didn’t trust the man.

_Wise_.

Pitch shifted forward, and Jack’s hand snapped back to his chest. Clean hair heavy with ice crystals hung in his eyes, now zeroed back in on Pitch’s face, and anywhere water must have trickled down his face and neck had was now dusted with frost. Their proximity was making Pitch just want to touch the ice, to melt it off with the heat of his skin and his tongue, and the fact that he couldn’t yet was nearly painful.

His hunger growled unhappily.

“What are you afraid of, Jack?” the king asked gently, wiggling the fingers of the hand now near his ear. “Are you afraid of me?”

The immediate, almost instinctual shake of Jack’s head had Pitch trying to suppress a smirk, and, after a pause, Jack’s eyes returned to the hand Pitch was holding up.

_Come on_. Pitch’s eyes traced over the frosted stains on Jack’s throat, all the blooms of darkness he could see under the spirit’s white top. _Just a little more_.

A bent knee dug into Pitch’s thigh, drawing the spirit nearly close enough for the king to get his mouth on pale, fear-riddled skin. Then a timid, icy touch danced up Pitch’s palm, and the king instantly clamped his hand around Jack’s.

The spirit made an alarmed noise, the fear swarming through his body exploding in distress, and Pitch pulled him in closer, until Jack’s knee slipped off his thigh and hit the mattress, until the spirit’s chest hit his and a cold hand began to shove at Pitch’s shoulder.

A cold hand that dug painfully into Pitch’s muscles as soon as the king’s free hand latched onto Jack’s hip.

The spirit whimpered as Pitch’s fingers grazed over bone, over a too-thin waist and the marred skin covering it. The poison stung a little upon contact, probably angry that it was being lifted from such lovely skin, and like before, Pitch felt pockets of tainted fear burst in his blood before dulling and disappearing.

As Jack struggled to get out of his hold, Pitch thoughtfully pulled fear riddle with heat and noise from Jack’s cold stomach, the sensation of both blooming and withering beneath Pitch’s skin.

_The poison is able to provoke real fears and conjure false ones_ , he thought to himself, rarely getting the chance to analyse this new edition the Nightmares seemed to have evolved, _which is probably what the Nightmares use as a helpful target marker during their hunts. But the stain it leaves over the skin seems to get tainted by memories left in the flesh, as if the Nightmares want any prey left unfound to literally be scared out of their own skin_.

It was almost genius, in a way, and Pitch felt a bubbling of bitter irritation over the fact that they’d developed such a ruthless hunting technique without him.

An icy hand clamped over his moving wrist, and the spirit choked, “Pitch stop,” as his face crumbled in a way that was nearly as beautiful as it was annoying, “you can’t –”

“I can’t what?” he replied. The perceptive spirit twitched a little, and when Jack tried to move away, to _escape_ , Pitch used the breath of space between them to run a hand up the length of Jack’s abdomen, utterly undeterred by the fingers trying to deny the motion. “I can’t remove the poison that has you so frightened?”

He felt over a colder-than natural abdomen, taut skin and the barest outline of muscle that were shivering with the spirit’s ragged breaths. The hand gripped by Pitch’s struggled, but weakly, uselessly. “No, you _know_ , you –”

“They’re just scars,” the king said as his fingers brushed over the marred skin of a particularly large one and drew panic and the (thankfully, brief) smell of burning flesh into his veins.

“They’re disgusting.”

Pitch’s hand paused at the corner of the spirit’s ribs, and he looked up to meet Jack’s guarded eyes. “Were you told that?”

Jack said nothing, only swallowed and looked away, and the king sighed to himself. He’d known for a while that the spirit had some serious problems with exposing his torso, and he hadn’t really fought him much on the topic because Jack seemed to have formulated some impression that Pitch had a similar hang up to him.

And even though the king _didn’t_ – he just didn’t go parading around shirtless because the tattoos on his back were nobody’s fucking business – it had eliminated a shred of the tension Pitch felt now that the mentioned tattoos were permanent. Ten years ago, anyone who’d had the audacity to ask him to remove his clothes (regardless of what the situation was) would have sorely regretted the request – but at Pitch’s own discretion, since his tattoos had been made of shadows and thus concealable with a roll of his shoulders.

But now… they weren’t as easy to hide from prying eyes. And while his paranoia had been settling in for a long stay in a small, sealable, villain-infested realm, he had quietly appreciated Jack’s lack of nosiness.

However, the appreciation and the _respect_ the king had experienced and was exercising evaporated when the insecurities the spirit had threw a blockade in the way of Pitch’s business.

“Look at me,” the king commanded. Jack’s eyes hesitantly skittered back to him, and Pitch held them mercilessly as he splayed his palm and his fingers over every inch of flesh he could, leeching poison as he pointedly felt up the spirit. “Do I look disgusted to you?”

The spirit shuddered, and when Pitch grazed his sternum, laced with a fear that was suffocating and taut, his hand slipped from Pitch’s and returned to bunching the neck of his shirt. His eyes squeezed shut for a pained moment, and then snapped open and his whole body went very still as Pitch’s touch slid across to his ribs.

The king’s fingers twitched as they traced the bones in Jack’s ribcage, winding up under the spirit’s arm only to return and follow the dips between each prominent bone. The fear that was curled around these bones, dancing along the skin, was filled with a disgusting amount of pain. He had to fight off a physical wince as agonized screams cut beneath his flesh, as the sensation of splintering bone prodded at the tips of his fingers.

The spirit’s breath stuttered, and when Pitch looked at him, he saw that Jack’s eyes had grown a little too vacant. Gritting his teeth, the king sent an unimpressed look to the bones caught up in such an intense fear – a look that turned into a flat out glare when he noticed the familiar stamens curled around each rib.

_Why are you there?_ he thought at the damn fear, staring the lotus down until the last of the pain prickled and dulled.

Only once Pitch could trace the ribs on Jack’s left side without feeling an inkling of fear did Jack exhale smoothly. When he felt the cold breath touch his forehead, Pitch glanced up and noted that his eyes had refocused, gaze intent on the king without the barest flicker.

_Progress. Good._

But then, still with a blistering of hesitancy, the spirit pried his hand off Pitch’s shirt and used it to touch the side of the king’s face. Pitch’s jaw clenched a little at the cold, but Jack was searching his expression with both his eyes and his fingers, as if he needed his touch to confirm what he was seeing, and Pitch wasn’t about to shake the frightened spirit off.

Especially not when Jack moved in closer to the king, tilting Pitch’s head back a little so he could hold his eyes as his spine arched and his shoulders hunched – as he shifted just enough for Pitch’s poison-purifying hand to slip onto his back.

And for a moment, as Pitch’s touch skimmed over more ribs and found Jack’s spine, gaze still caught by pure ice, he thought, _This spirit really is too fucking skinny_.

But then his touch wandered lower, beyond where he should’ve been able to feel the unevenness of any bones, and he realised that it wasn’t that Jack was too skinny – which he most definitely was, but that wasn’t what the spirit wanted Pitch to feel.

He wanted Pitch to feel the jagged skin that seemed to span his entire back, the veins of scarring that tore in gashes in some places, and curved into pronounced rings in others.

The hand he had clenched around Jack’s tightened a little as another laving of fear poured into the king’s body. Pain muffled by ice, words and darkness blending into one entity, one fear. Pitch’s fingers dug a little harder into Jack’s skin as soon as he noticed which fear it was, and as the spirit flinched, eyebrows pulling together in confusion, Pitch felt his bloodlust creep beneath his muscles and _rumble_ , much like it had last night.

_It switches from “let’s kill the frost spirit” to “let’s kill anyone who’s ever touched the frost spirit” awfully quickly,_ he thought, closing his eyes for a moment to quell the rage before it tried to convince him to do something rash.

A cold hand splayed on Pitch’s cheek, and the Nightmare King opened his eyes just as Jack rocked in and brushed his nose against Pitch’s. “Disgusted yet?” the spirit whispered.

_No, but I’m getting annoyed that you think I would be_ , he felt like spitting back. But Pitch could be a gentleman when he needed to, and instead of verbally slapping the spirit with his honest opinion, the king just spread his palm over the small of Jack’s back and growled, “You can answer that for yourself,” as he dragged him in closer with a rough jerk.

Jack made a nervous noise as his sternum knocked Pitch’s chest, and before the king could reassure the spirit that he was fine – he wasn’t made of _glass_ , fucking damn it – the hand he was holding stiffened and Pitch suddenly had a wad of ice numbing through his left hand.

Grimacing, he tried to flex his hand away from Jack’s as gently as he could. “I can do this faster if I have both hands,” he gritted out as frost bit at his skin.

It took Jack a second to process Pitch’s words, and then the spirit was jolting away from the king with a frightened noise, fingers cracking out of Pitch’s palm before instantly returning to claw off the ice. “I’m sorry,” he blurted, breath hitching as he tried to dust off Pitch’s hand, “I’m sorry is your hand okay oh god –”

Pitch just rolled his eyes at the spirit’s fretting and evaded Jack’s touch to wipe his practically numb palm on his trouser leg. He murmured, “It’s fine, stop panicking,” as he slipped his hand under the shirt and started feeling over the spirit’s right side.

_At least the burning is well and truly gone_ , he thought as he moved in and, starting at the top of Jack’s shoulders, ran his hands down the entire expanse of the spirit’s back, his touch infused with pure intent and more than a dash of pressure.

A small sound broke somewhere in Jack’s throat, and he arched up into Pitch’s hands, back curving when the king reached the base of his spine and then flinching forward when he continued lower without a pause.

The spirit groaned, a hand clenching in the back of the king’s shirt. His mouth bumped into Pitch’s cheek as the man took his precious time feeling over the spirit’s ass and down the backs of his thighs. “Can’t you just…” Jack panted, twitching when Pitch’s fingers skimmed the inside of his thighs, “frisk me like an airport security guard?”

_Ahh, the sass has returned. I suppose that’s a good sign._ “But that wouldn’t be any fun, would it?” Pitch murmured as his hands travelled back up the spirit’s hipbones. He skimmed over a slim waist and paused, for a moment, to draw the fear from his right ribs before continuing higher until –

Jack’s entire body jerked into Pitch’s touch when the king reached his chest, a shiver that for once wasn’t out of fear prickling the skin beneath Pitch’s hands. The spirit collapsed in against Pitch’s neck, cold breath breaking against his skin as the Nightmare King lingered, for maybe longer than he needed to, on the sensitive buds beneath his fingers.

After all, he was nothing if not thorough.

Jack made another small noise in his throat, one that sounded distinctly like a swallowed moan, and muttered an unhappy but rough, “…sadist,” against Pitch’s neck.

The cold word brushed against his skin, and the king smirked. Having the spirit shivering under his touch was a sensation he was coming to wholly crave, and with Jack’s head hopefully void of any internal noise for now, he decided to give his hunger a bit of leash so he could properly enjoy it.

_“I don’t get why you have some sort of choke hold on your libido as well as your emotions.”_

_Stupid spirit_ , he thought as he left Jack’s chest, albeit a little reluctantly, and traced over a pair of bony collarbones and shoulders. _I have a choke hold on the hunger so I don’t take you apart as literally as it begs me to_.

But he was more than ready to slightly loosen the hold for worthwhile situations – and it just so happened that having the spirit half naked and trembling in his lap was _decidedly_ worthwhile.

Turning his head slightly (and consequently marvelling at the way Jack seemed to unconsciously move in against his cheek), he murmured in Jack’s ear, “Consider it your punishment for running headlong into a pack of Nightmares.”

Jack just made a noncommittal groan in reply, and Pitch pulled his hands out from under the spirit’s shirt so he could wrap them around the back of his thighs. He sprung back at the sudden shift in Pitch’s focus, and the king barely gave him enough time to protest before he was attempting to lift the leg Jack was still trying to stand on.

 “Sit,” he said when it became clear that Jack couldn’t take a hint.

The spirit looked at him in confusion, and when Pitch pulled at his leg again, grabbed onto the front of Pitch’s shirt and hung on tight. “What? What are you –?”

“Sit and give me your legs.”

Dubiously, Jack glanced down at the pair’s arrangement, and began to settle himself on the leg he already had one of his thrown over. But that wasn’t a part of Pitch’s plan, and as soon as Jack went to get comfortable, Pitch’s hand slid down a bare thigh and hooked under the spirit’s knee, pulling the leg up and Jack to the middle of his lap.

“ _Argh,_ my god _what –_ ”

The spirit flailed, clearly having little trust in Pitch’s strength, but when he seemed to realise that the king had closed his legs to make more room for Jack to sit, that there was in fact no way for the spirit to fall through and onto the floor, he relaxed just a little.

And then Pitch, doing his best to bite back a vicious smile, yanked at the leg in his hand, pulling it over his shoulder while he felt the other dig into the bed behind him in clear panic. The spirit tipped backwards violently, and he had to let go of Pitch’s shirt and clamp his hands onto the king’s knees to keep balance. “Jesus, Pitch, if I just sat on the bed –”

Not even pretending to listen, Pitch stretched the leg over his shoulder out vertically, and the spirit’s protests dissolved into an irritated noise. “I’m not that flexible, you know,” he grumbled.

Pitch just hitched an invisible eyebrow. “Could have fooled me.”

Jack huffed, the tiniest of smiles growing on his face, and his head tilted back as his eyes watched Pitch’s hands trace over his leg. The frost melting and the poison visibly fading under his fingers, Pitch’s touch moved up, over Jack’s knee and his stained calf, drawing bursts of – thankfully – barely-decipherable fear with it.

When Pitch reached his ankle, his other hand tracing back down a now-porcelain thigh, Jack’s brow furrowed a little, and the Nightmare King asked, in mild curiosity, “What does it feel like?”

Jack swallowed, and shifted a little as Pitch traced the bones in his foot. “It feels like you’re pulling threads out of my skin,” he said quietly. “Tiny little strings that leave holes in the muscle and skin. Like worms.”

_That doesn’t sound pleasant_ , Pitch thought, pulling Jack’s foot down – and consequently pushing the spirit’s knee into his own face, which Jack grumbled about – and inspecting it. _Although it could be a product of the fear._

Satisfied with his work, Pitch gave the leg back to its owner, and Jack tentatively wrapped it around Pitch’s waist. Without needing to be asked, he offered the king his other leg, which Pitch accepted with a small smirk.

_“Not that flexible” my ass, I could easily bend him out of shape_ , he thought, perhaps a tad hungrily, as he pressed his fingers into Jack’s flesh and _pulled_. Jack twitched slightly, and Pitch glanced at him only to see blue eyes locked onto his. His expression was still a little tense, but between those cracks of fear there was something entirely different.

Something that had Pitch’s hunger rumbling in pleasure.

Jaw clenching, the king traced fingers over the last of the darkened marks on Jack’s calf, making, frankly, a valiant effort of ignoring the way Jack’s other thigh was pressing against his hip a little too firmly –

– a valiant effort that was utterly wasted the minute Pitch released Jack’s leg and the spirit’s hands immediately left Pitch’s knees to trace down his abdomen.

He huffed a surprised breath as Jack’s cold seeped through his shirt and into his skin, bleeding into the muscles of his abdomen and his navel before the spirit’s hand turned and determined fingers dragged over crotch.

Pitch exhaled roughly as he was reminded, rudely, of exactly how _much_ he appreciated having the spirit vulnerable and trembling and _bent_ in his lap. Mindlessly, his hands found the legs either side of him, and his fingers bit into Jack’s inner thighs as he spread them apart just a little, just enough to have Jack shaking ever so slightly and give the king a better view of the fingers working over his fly.

His eyes flickered up to Jack’s and he uttered, “What do you think you’re doing?”

Holding the king’s eyes, the spirit’s other hand began tracing path back up underneath his shirt. When a particularly firm stroke through his pants nearly had Pitch groaning, Jack leaned into the hands clenching on his thighs and said, “You’re hard.”

He _was_ , but he also had a _job to do_ , and Pitch might’ve been a sadist but he was also a fucking _professional_ –

His hunger whined when he grabbed at the hands working over him, but he could ignore its complaints. He could ignore the how ridiculously uncomfortable and nearly painful it was to have Jack sitting so close, his cock so hard, and not throw the spirit onto the floor and –

With a low growl, the king held up the wrists he’d claimed and gestured pointedly to the still-poisoned forearms exposed by the loose sleeves of the shirt. “You should be more worried about yourself. I’m not done yet.”

But Jack just twisted out of Pitch’s grip, and with a hand sliding under the hem of his own top, he lifted the white material just high enough to reveal – when Pitch’s eyes immediately dropped to the exposed skin – that the spirit was as achingly hard as he was.

Pitch’s hunger practically _purred_ at the sight.

“I am worrying about myself,” Jack murmured faintly, and once Pitch had finished appreciating the sight he was presented with – only the darkest corner of his mind bothering to notice the scar tissue he could also see – he glanced up and chuckled when he saw the dusting of blush across the spirit’s cheeks.

_He has some nerve being embarrassed at this stage._

“Let me finish this first,” he said, and he had to forcibly clench his fists when his hunger begged him to just _grab_ the spirit.

Jack’s hand dropped and he shifted in a little closer to Pitch, bare thighs pressing against the king’s sides as the spirit suggested, “Or I could help both of us finish while you keep shamelessly feeling me up.”

Without his permission, Pitch’s hands found Jack’s hips and dug into the cold flesh, trying so intently not to just drag the spirit against him. “You should still be terrified,” he retorted, although he was very quickly losing interest in denying the spirit.

Jack just shrugged. “Fun and fear, am I right?” He brought his face close enough to brush his nose alongside Pitch’s, close enough that Pitch could smell snow and winter without any fear hindering his senses. “You down?”

Pitch’s eyes rolled back into his head at the question, and pointedly telling his hunger that he was not doing this because of its insistent _nagging_ , he exhaled a defeated, “Don’t let me stop you.”

Jack pulled back just enough to grin at the king, before his nose crashed back into Pitch’s and the king’s head was tilted up so his mouth could meet the spirit’s.

And the kiss – it was a soft one. It was an apology for mess the spirit had been that morning in the cottage. It was a deluge of molten ice that had Pitch forgiving the earlier scattering of fear and desperation, the feel of a numb mouth moving with him but not melting _into_ him as he’d come to expect from the spirit.

It was a small thing, a minuscule change. But desire was desire and Pitch wanted Jack to _drown_ in it whenever he touched the spirit.

Which seemed to be exactly the case now – for all of a few seconds before Pitch pulled back with a start.

Jack froze. “What?”

Pitch licked at his lips with a hint of confusion. “You taste different.”

The frostbitten blush returned, and Jack smiled nervously as he admitted, “It’s mouthwash.” Pitch just stared at the spirit, utterly unmoved by the information, and Jack added hesitantly, “You’re tasting mint. Yves’s puts it in his food sometimes, I’ll show you when he does.”

_Huh_ , Pitch thought as his tongue traced back over his bottom lip. It was a sharp taste, one he didn’t think he liked too much, and in Jack’s mouth the cool temperature seemed to give the flavour an edge that Pitch wasn’t too fond of.

Self-consciously, Jack began to shift back a little. “Is it no good?” he asked, worried. “I just – I needed –”

Before Jack could stutter himself into a state, Pitch pried a hand off Jack’s hip so he could wrap it around the side of the spirit’s jaw and dragged him in for a kiss that was so deep the spirit shuddered into it. He ran his tongue over Jack’s, laving at the muscle until the spirit’s hips and thighs were trembling and Pitch could taste Jack’s delicate, cold flavour again. He tilted Jack’s head a little and gave a similar treatment to the roof the spirit’s mouth, the back of his teeth, everywhere with the slightest hint of sensitivity until he was left with only the spirit’s lips, which he bit at hungrily.

By the time he was finished, Jack was panting and the very sight of the spirit, flushed and wide-eyed, nearly had Pitch growling.

He pulled the dazed spirit in for another moment, kissing him thoroughly but quickly before letting go of Jack’s face altogether and returning his hand to the spirit’s hip. “Better,” he decided, and didn’t even bother hiding his smirk when he saw wonder and maybe a little fear in the spirit’s expression.

“Holy shit,” Jack breathed.

The king shifted closer, his hands travelling around to Jack’s ass as he sent a significant look toward their laps. “Well?”

“Goddamnit Pitch,” Jack huffed, rubbing a hand over his face, “I nearly came from that kiss. Give me a second.”

Pitch’s smirk grew. “Didn’t you say you have an excellent refractory period?”

Jack sneered at him, but there was no true harshness in the expression, and it disappeared altogether as soon as the spirit laid his hands on Pitch’s face. “Don’t you have a job to do?” he taunted, and Pitch just hummed as the spirit moved in to kiss him again.

_Hmm, definitely better_ , he thought absently as he let Jack have control over the kiss. He dragged his hands up Jack’s back, retracing over all those scars one more time before spreading his hands over the spirit’s shoulders and as much of his upper arms as he could reach. The shirt was fairly loose, which thankfully gave Pitch access to a decent amount of skin without having to take the garment off – a suggestion he suspected would be brutally shut down by the spirit.

More fear puckered beneath Pitch’s skin, but he barely took any notice of it – too preoccupied mindlessly returning Jack’s kisses – until his fingers brushed over a spot on Jack’s shoulder that had Pitch tensing.

Blood, fading pain, screaming. Children crying.

He pulled back from Jack, and the spirit nuzzled in against his cheek – a little tense himself from the fear Pitch had just found. The Nightmare King pulled the neck of the shirt to the side and got another look at the pale shoulder he’d inspected earlier that day.

And the tiny ring of teeth marks in Jack’s skin.

_“Our spirits tried to save some, save the little ones they were with, but the portals were sealed and then the faeries turned on them.”_

He ran his thumb over the scar, distracted, for a moment, by a strange melancholy summoned by the thought that this child-adoring spirit had –

With a low noise, Jack caught his mouth again, recapturing Pitch’s attention with kiss that was languid enough to send a shuddering heat through the king’s navel. He let go of Jack’s shirt, let go of the strange, sad feeling and dug his fingers into Jack’s waist as the spirit’s hand returned to his pants.

“– fucking _buttons_ –”

Pitch snorted as soon as Jack’s mouth left his to glare down at the fly he hated so much, and the spirit tossed him an ungrateful look. “I told you to get new pants,” he muttered, impatiently trying to slip his fingers between the buttons.

Mentally rolling his eyes, Pitch used the spirit’s fumbling to skim back up Jack’s chest, pointedly avoiding his nipples – for which Jack glared at him – before tracing over as much of the spirit’s upper arms as he could reach from this angle. “Excuse me for not throwing out my entire wardrobe overnight,” he replied as poison and fear vanished into his skin.

“I doubt anyone would complain,” Jack mumbled to himself as he finally managed to free a few of the buttons. Eyes narrowing at the comment, on his return, Pitch made sure this time not to miss his marks, and Jack let out a clearly involuntary whine as his fingers fumbled with the last of the buttons.

He received a dark look for his troubles, one which he tried hard not to laugh at. With a victorious smile, Jack finally tugged Pitch’s pants out of the way so he could get in close enough to curl both of his hands around them.

As cold seared his hot flesh, Pitch exhaled against Jack’s mouth. He slipped his fingers beneath the spirit’s sleeves as Jack shuddered, tracing up Jack’s forearms and past his elbows as icy breath stuttered against his lips. The constriction was incredible, the feel of Jack’s delicate shudders even more so. The friction, though, had both males hissing – and not in an entirely good way.

“Fuck,” Jack groaned, letting go of them and shifting even closer, “we need... need to invest in lube.” He dragged his shirt out of the way as he pushed his body against Pitch’s, cold shivering against heat like the spirit couldn’t quite bear to move away yet.

Pitch growled some indifferent noise against Jack’s neck, and absorbing what he could feel to be the last of the poison on the spirit’s arms, he grabbed Jack by his bare ass and yanked him in harder.

“Ngh, _shit_. Pitch, spit on me.”

The king’s mind blanked a little at the request, and he turned his face away from Jack’s throat to see the determined expression on the spirit’s face.

“This is life or death,” Jack insisted, holding a hand out to Pitch’s face, “ _spit_ _on_ _me_.”

Rolling his eyes, the king did as the spirit asked, and once Jack had added his own saliva to his palm, he returned his grip to their lengths. The wetness was beyond welcome, and Jack let out a relieved groan as soon as he could start moving – a sound which Pitch swallowed hungrily.

His hands skimmed over Jack’s frost-dusted throat, the last of what he could see of the poison, and mid-kiss the spirit moaned as Pitch’s fingers pressed over his windpipe.

_Fuck_ , Pitch thought as the noise went straight to his cock. _Fuck_.

It didn’t take long for Jack to shudder deeply, noises murmuring into Pitch’s mouth. The king was barely keeping hold of his own control as his hands tore down from Jack’s throat and bit into whatever skin he could grab at to just feel the spirit _moving_ , muscles tensing and shaking. “Pitch…” Jack panted.

The king’s hips twitched up into the spirit’s hands, his own breath becoming uneven. “You’re fine, just keep…”

But Jack’s hands were loosening, his rhythm failing as he got closer to the edge, and Pitch wrapped a hand around Jack’s and squeezed, applying an almost painful amount of pressure as he dragged their hands to the base of their shafts, holding the grip there just long enough for Jack to whine. After that, all he needed was a few firm pumps and the spirit was trembling and coming, biting at Pitch’s mouth with a whimper until the king properly kissed him back.

He let Jack go along with one of the spirit’s hands, and kept the other to finish himself off, sliding the spirit’s wet palm over himself until his hips jerked forward and Jack, face flushed and arm trembling, made another beautiful, broken sound for him that rocked straight through Pitch.

His hips stuttered, the spirit’s palm tightening, and his forehead knocked into Jack’s cheek as he came.

“Thanks…” the spirit said breathlessly, swallowing when Pitch’s nose touched the side of his neck. “Thanks for… getting rid of the poison…”

Clarity pinched at Pitch as he absently, and maybe a little reverently, bit at the spirit’s neck, and after a moment he found himself thinking tiredly, _I wouldn’t have had to if you hadn’t picked a leader to drag back here – or any Nightmare at all, in fact_.

Sighing, the king pulled away from the spirit and tossed Jack onto the frost-stained quilt. He grabbed the box of tissues sitting upon a dresser on the other side of the room and dropped a handful of them on Jack’s lap when he returned, pointedly ignoring the concern on Jack’s face as he cleaned himself up with some tissues of his own.

“I’m sorry,” Jack blurted.

Pitch glanced at the male as he tucked himself back into his pants, and after a solid moment of silence, Jack began to wipe at his thighs and stomach. “I’m not sorry for bringing the Nightmare here,” the spirit said quietly. “You’re gonna have to deal with that. But I’m sorry for picking a fight. And being a dick. I just…” he stopped for a moment, tissues balled in his hand, before admitting softly, “I guess I just didn’t want to be the one backed into a corner for once.”

The understanding he’d been trying to beat off earlier poked at him with irritating fingers, and Pitch’s brow furrowed.

Retrospectively, and honestly, the fury he’d been hanging onto for most of the day probably had more to do with their argument than Jack actually bringing a Nightmare into the realm. Of course, he’d been mad over being so utterly caught off guard by not only an example of his failure as a king, but a breathing, evolved illustration of how _incompetent_ he’d been this last decade.

He’d also been furious at Jack for bringing something that wanted him _dead_ into a realm he’d thought was safe enough to sleep in each night, but ultimately he’d been even angrier at having the Nightmares and their defiance and his _inability_ _to_ _fix_ _it_ thrown in his face.

_By someone who felt_ empathy _for the beasts, of all things_ , he thought in slight amazement as the spirit’s apology seemed sooth, mildly, whatever shard of Pitch’s bloodlust was still even remotely interested in killing the male.

“I didn’t mean what I said,” Jack added when Pitch did nothing but take the balled tissue from the spirit’s lifeless grip. “You’d be an awesome Nightmare King even without the shadows.”

Pitch twitched at the attempted reassurance, and he felt his pride stumble on the breaking ground it was trying to stand on. In a low voice, he told the spirit, “There would be no Nightmare King without the shadows.”

Jack stared at him for a moment, his eyebrows twisting in concern and maybe a hint of relief. Turning his back on the expression, Pitch dropped the tissues into the bin by the still-shivering wardrobe and warned the spirit, “You and I will talk soon, corners or no.” He looked at Jack, at the nervousness creeping into the spirit’s eyes. “So tell me when you can.”

Jack blinked at him. Then he nodded, looking a little tense. “Yeah, okay.”

Somewhere outside the small room Jack had furnished with ice and frost, the Nightmare in Yves’s sables screamed loud enough to startle a flinch out of the spirit and the wardrobe. Rolling his eyes in annoyance, the king cracked open the window to let some of the outside air warm up the room, and shot the frost spirit a dark look when another angry scream cut through the realm.

“This is your fault,” he said dryly.

Jack stuck his tongue out at him. “Yeah, yeah.” Then, with a hesitant pause, the spirit asked, “Um, hey, do you think I could, uh…”

He gestured toward his bare legs, apparently suddenly conscious of his half-naked state, and Pitch cocked an eyebrow at the male. “I’m tempted to say no.”

“ _Please_.”

A colourful few minutes later, Jack had worked his way into a clean pair of Pitch’s trousers (and rolled the too-long legs up his calves until he looked like some shipwrecked urchin) and crumbled the pikes of ice in the corner of the room, sending most of the broken ice and frost out the window on a brisk wind.

Pitch cracked the ice off the doorframe while Jack effectively swept the cold away with his staff and the winds, and once he’d gotten the last of it off and Jack was throwing it out the window with little regard for anyone who might be walking on Yves’s decayed lawns, Pitch noticed a smudge of darkness on the back of the spirit’s neck.

“I missed a spot,” he noted, and just as Jack turned back to him, Pitch slid his hand up the spirit’s nape, fingers threading through hair as his palm pressed against the top of Jack’s spine.

As soon as his skin came into contact with the poison, Jack’s eyes widened in terror and he shrieked a broken, rattling sound that honestly startled Pitch a little too much.

The spirit tore Pitch’s touch off him, his own fingers returning to scratch over his neck with a paranoid tremor.

The king glanced down at his hand, at the dark poison fading as it was absorbed into his own skin, and for a moment he felt his hand get split open by cuts that were so sharp that he could barely feel any pain at all. He felt blood over his fingers, a talon curling and agony shooting. He heard voices yelling.

Another voice _seeking_.

Then Jack asked him nervously, “Did you get it off?”

Pitch looked at the spirit, one hand gripping his staff while the other rubbed over the back of his neck.

_“Then you don’t remember the other thing I saw?”_

_“I do remember. Do you know what it was?”_

_“No.”_

_“Are you lying to me?”_

“Yes,” the king said, hand curling and falling into his pocket. “Let’s go.”

 

Out in the stables, Pitch’s eyes narrowed when he saw Yves sitting on a crate in the middle of the room, legs crossed and a glass of wine in his hand as he stared thoughtfully at the Nightmare _still_ trying to break out of the stall.

Yves barely acknowledged either male when Pitch and Jack walked in, only holding up a mug to Jack when the frost spirit squished up on the crate next to the man.

The spirit accepted the mug with a grimace, and as Pitch wandered past the scythe still lying on the ground and up to the Nightmare, he heard a wry, “Nice pants,” come out of Yves’s mouth.

Pitch’s eyes rolled back in his head and Jack grumbled, “Shut up.”

“You swept all that ice out of the bedroom, yes?”

Pitch could almost _hear_ Jack flushing. “Yeah, ‘course.”

He turned to the two conversing males and sized both of them up with an impatient look. The problem was, though, that they were looking at him with the same expression.

“Well?” Jack asked, mug resting on his knee. “You gonna do something?”

Jack and Yves both stared at Pitch, the former smiling encouragingly while the latter sipped at his wine, and Pitch just turned back to the Nightmare itching to eat him and sighed.

_They’re not leaving, are they?_ he realised with a hint of despair, and as if in answer, the Nightmare roared right in his face.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Firstly, thank you everyone so much for your kudos and comments. I'm sorry that i took so long to reply to them all and that this update took literally forever. The next chapter will be the third part of what i have mentally dubbed the "Nightmare Arc" and it'll answer a lot of the questions these two bring up, but i have to write that one and i didn't want to leave you guys much longer without an update so, yeah.
> 
> also, i made a tumblr: ekhosays-i. It's a sad little thing at the moment, a newborn mushroom, but i will spruce it up eventually


End file.
